


Money, Morals and Mint

by SounHealth



Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Bounty Hunters, Arthur Deserves Happiness, Crimes & Criminals, Drinking, Enemies to Lovers, Eventual Smut, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, Swearing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-09-18 04:28:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16988040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SounHealth/pseuds/SounHealth
Summary: The job comes to the office. Says a ‘John Marston’ is a wanted man -- and Arthur finds that to be true, in ways it shouldn’t be.





	1. Foolhardy.

**Author's Note:**

> * Note: the smut has arrived in [chapter six!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16988040/chapters/40846919) Knock yourselves out, folks -- if you want to skip it or skip to it, that is.
> 
> This is my first fic mess of thousands of words. Featuring: AU-lenience with places and names since reading maps is a pain, long damn chapters, Australian English, criminally handsome John Marston and mild canon-derivative spoilers. Updates are officially irregular as hell. I am majorly inexperienced, so your words are dear to me?
> 
> * Note: also have some [fantastic artwork](http://tantasticart.tumblr.com/image/182148314670) by [Tantastic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tantastic/)?!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This ‘John Marston’ might just be more of a fool than the lot of them.

In another life, they may have been outlaws. May have been killers and crooks and fools, running from one lonely hideaway of the plains to another -- and may have liked it, risk and recklessness damn them all.

Arthur supposes they _are_ fools, at least: he, and most everyone else. Bill was a fool in all ways the word was likely coined for. Sean loved to play the fool, basked happy and blind in it like a pup in spring sun. Javier was a follower-addled boy, and more than a fool because of it. Hosea was the only one of them with his head still clean, but he had rode this long mothering a gaggle of fools, so what did that make him? Charles and Lenny were fools too, by birthright, if you asked the fools that ruled this country. And Dutch, well, Dutch weren’t a fool so much as he sometimes fooled himself with his pretty hopes for the world.

Arthur Morgan was a fool in that he stayed, and nursed a hole in his heart where a woman once warmed the space there.

And--

“Fin’lly back home!”

Micah is yelling out, kicking away his horse as he finds ground. It makes a sharp cry as it flees.

“Home with whiskey an’ women an’ more whiskey. Right, men?” he says.

Arthur regrets he never did leave with Mary, all those years ago.

Getting off his mare Sol is heavier work with the thought, but no use pondering years-old could-have-beens. Not when he still regrets their last job -- he’s tired, bruises welting under his collar, and a measly twenty dollars richer when he hitches his black steed by the sheriff’s office. Here atop a hill, the whole sad sight of Fallswood greets him at once from below.

Through it all is the dark, soil road that the tumbledown structures rise from like milkweed, or tombs. There are houses, desert-dry and old wood. The inn cuts the tallest figure: a stately white building of pine siding and strewn paint that sees to tourists and other city-clothed folk that don’t belong this far west. Beside it is the general store, falling apart, rotted planks, but lovingly mended time eternal, and by that, the alarm red saloon-and-stay with red paint still wet, catching the last of daylight. It must have been repainted only yesterday when they were gone. For a way-out town a saloon like that is in better condition than it ought to be in -- oddly inviting, too -- but the barkeep has an eye for welcoming fixtures, and with how many sun-worn men and women in need of poison pass through, it won’t be lacking patronage anytime soon. The same can’t be said of the bank on the other side, where the road begins to taper off into bruise-purple hills. The gold lettering on that place has long since rusted. And somewhere farther, beyond men and sight -- maybe up by the cliffside, though Arthur forgets -- is a cathedral, brick, broken, and watching over the town.

Fallswood may have all the air of a place that is easy to miss and easier to forget, but it has been home for them a long time now. And coming home is still the comfort it once was, July burn be damned.

Some of the others are still riding in, some of them packing, so Arthur joins them on the yellowed lawn. Charles asks him how his wounds are when he makes it into town, bounding over the fence as the last to arrive. Arthur waves him off, the polite way to say ‘absolutely Goddamn painful’ and just as equally nothing at all. He pays for it -- the cuts in his flesh start stinging then like some due karma. He tries to draw weight off them, leaving some of his guns with his ride, stripping himself of his bandolier, and while he feels vulnerable it makes him feel less heavy, less burdened, even with his thoughts still wandering to darker places.

The six-shooter at his side he takes out in boredom and cleans it -- browned blood, fleshy matter and grease, for he had been pressured up close -- before holstering it carelessly where it belongs. He has half a mind to turn it on himself for entertainment or to put him out of this summer misery before heatstroke does, and he wishes, not for the first time, that he were an outlaw so he might rob the fools in this sleepy place.

In another life, then. Here, he does his best: takes out the poster of his last job, a scar-dirtied O’Driscoll gone bad (imagine, worse than a ‘good’ O’Driscoll) and he brings the fire of a struck match to the paper. Arson was too common to be a real crime in this town, but he wonders if this Riley boy might be offended by the act, down in Hell. Burned to nothing, like all other unwanted waste.

Might not be, but down the one street of the town a lady watches him from her pink and blue garden. Then hurries indoors frightfully.

For all the glorifying and romance bounty hunting gets, it sure is a strange line of work. The only kind where a gang of nearly ten men can trudge into town wearing blood and oil-shined guns with nothing but time-heavied sighs from the law and the disappointment they hold for themselves knowing they need questionable help from questionable men to enforce their very own questionable rules.

The townsfolk have different looks, unknown as they are to any world outside their own. They watch the posse ride through, like children secretly staring out of dusty windows in their innocence. Through the muddied glass, they watch with awe, wonder, curiosity, fear -- all things only those who have never known killing would care to feel.

Along the path to the office, uphill, Dutch walks on ahead. He’s framed by the porch and the fifty-star flag that dances beside it. Somehow it suits him.

“You coming, Arthur?” he says.

Arthur follows, says, “Okay,” as he always does, and the others stay still beside their horses, not quite knowing what to do with themselves.

At the chipped stairs to the entrance, Dutch spins, arms wide, ever the showman -- maybe he were a politician in another life.

“It’s been a good, hard week for us all,” he says, with softness. Could be compassion if Dutch van der Linde knew of such a thing, but most chance of it being the humidity blunting his bite. “I think every one of you except me, Hosea, and Arthur, should go out and make yourselves useful. Find jobs, rumours, or whatever you can on the next town. Then rest.”

These lost men wait for his word. That was the thing with him, he kept people captivated, moved, trapped by his talks of freedom. Because he made people want to trust in him, in the life he saw fit for them, and like fools, they followed.

He holds the brass doorknob. “Go on, then.”

The magic that binds them breaks, just like that. In moments, whether from the heat or fatigue or promise of work, the boys all sigh, leaving as dull as they had come. Arthur watches Bill’s back, wondering if he’ll be able to do what’s asked of him -- and then watches Micah’s back, hoping he’ll do nothing at all.

. . . . .

A familiar bell chimes as the door to the sheriff’s office creaks sorrily open. Arthur walks through, heels behind Dutch, Hosea behind his heels, and waiting already for the talking to end and the shooting to start.

The light in here is cold, electric. He blinks away the sunset in his eyes, adjusting slowly to that difference, and while he does the man behind the desk filters into view with his pale blue shirt, pale blonde hair, pale Stetson hung up on the wall -- he’s the American figure of good that the world once told him about. A bona fide U.S marshal and county sheriff, the law itself ‘round these parts.

“The van der Linde boys, huh?” the marshal says. He keeps his eyes on his papers and fingers on his pipe, seeming more than content to stay seated, and perhaps that is for the best; there are pink burns along his freckles and ears. July is kind to no one, not even good men. “I was getting used to a bit of peace and quiet, and then you lot have to ruin it.”

Dutch laughs, and has this wide-eyed stare like he might start waxing lyrical again. Arthur talks before he can, with a huff.

“Don’t be like that, sheriff,” he says, tipping his hat and frowning at the dust it leaves on his skin -- a touch pink, too. “You know well as we do that peace would only make you bored. And penniless.”

The man smiles.

“My livelihood rests with the rule breakers, that it does.” Craning his neck, he blinks once, twice, after finally sparing his visitors a glance with drowsy grey eyes. “Good lord, Mr Morgan. You look terrible.”

Arthur shrugs his shoulders, feels his bruises mocking him under the crimson of his shirt. Hides blood and his wounds it does, but not the pain of it. There’s a swell under his eye, a gash in his stomach, and rope burns at his neck to play it lightly. The O’Driscoll bounty had somehow ended with him being held captive and strung up, but he retreats to quiet again, thinking he best spare a good man the bad truths.

The office seems bleak, empty, nearly worn-out like the rest of them by the summer heat. Arthur walks along each end, and the floorboards groan loud, hating him for it. There is baby blue paint weathered on wood all around them. He thinks Dutch would comment on it, say that it speaks of justice and morals that have been abandoned and forgotten in this town, in all towns, in this country.

Instead he turns to Arthur then, something like teasing crinkling the crow’s feet around his dark eyes.

“Back to brooding, my boy?”

Arthur ignores him, burned out of quips, and steps further away, searching the corkboards for faces. He finds only his annoyed scowl reflected in the window and the ever-dimming town behind.

“I’m surprised you spoke at all,” Dutch chuckles on. Talkative, when the weather gets hot enough to melt restraint. “One of these days, people might mistake you for a mute.”

And like it always is with Dutch, the whole room is being towed by him. The sheriff starts laughing, caught surprised by it, and Hosea joins in, adding, “You know, I did convince a whole bar that he weren’t right in the head!”

And like it always is with Arthur, he has to keep his mind on his work. Their work, really, if the others ever thought to remember it.

“No bounties, I see,” he bites out, feels the sting of his cut lip and pride. Standing in a beat-up town, still beat-up from their last outing, and all for nothing?

When Arthur turns back to face the lawman the irritation in him goes faint. He sees now that the marshal has a veiny red in his eyes, from sickness or overwork.

He frowns. “You don’t look so good yourself.”

“No, no, I’ll be alright,” the marshal eases. His eyes go pitying, downcast, and then he frowns, too. “Are you that desperate for work?”

“Well, I’d like it, but I can see you’re right out of it.”

A quiet falls over them. The marshal leaves his documents aside and begins pulling the drawer of his desk all slow, half hesitation, as he mutters, “Well, not exactly.”

More in authority would do well to be like the sheriff of Breaker County. He’s an honest sort, one of the few who might even have earned that silver star on his chest, might believe in merit and the good in men, and one which Arthur feels compelled to save from Dutch’s sorry brand of charisma. A rare happening, that is.

The man lifts one weathered parchment, unfolding it on the desk top. A scribble with eyes watches them all.

Now it’s Arthur’s turn to laugh. He weren’t the best artist when he first took to the lead, but he can’t help it: “That the face of a man or a mule?”

He picks at the yellowed paper, stunned with the question of why it might have been hidden away. Not for its... creative license, surely. His laughter rests to let his mind work. It gives him answers, possibilities -- all bad.

“That,” the marshal interrupts, “is the face of a dangerous man.”

Arthur is torn between rolling his eyes and leaning in to hear more. Dutch were right -- he can’t fight his nature, he supposes, and defaults to sarcasm. “Looks more like modern art.”

The marshal sighs. “No one actually knows what the man looks like.”

“Then what the hell is this?”

“A self-portrait,” he says. “They found a sketch of his, balled up in the forest. Labelled and named.”

Arthur bends over laughing. “This-- this artist pass for dangerous now?”

A low whistle stops him from offering more mockeries. Dutch is stalking closer to the desk, excitement and joy making his steps too quick. With his hat off his head and in his hand, his eyes seem to shine a decade more playful, even as his hair starts to turn ashen at the sides, the hair over his mouth not quite a full black like it once was.

“No, Arthur, the man is right.” He taps the inked face, insistent. “Nothing more dangerous than a man you can’t look at for fear of losing your life. This is the real deal.”

Arthur’s mouth goes lopsided as he picks up the paper. “This is a thief done got his identity stolen ‘cause he fancied himself an artist. Come on, Dutch.”

The paper leaves his hands with a deft tug. Hosea is there, pushing it so close in Arthur’s face he can smell the print and feel it tickle his nose.

“What Dutch is saying,” Hosea offers, grinning whitely, “is that he won’t say he told you so when you come back from this all bloody again.”

Arthur stares at the paper, floored by that old men’s intuition they share so proudly despite it seeming mad. It might be touching that they are putting aside the newly-growing differences between them which seem greater by the day, if it weren’t at his expense. He reads: “murder,” “robbery,” “kidnapping,” “fifty dollars to be awarded,” and “wanted alive.” Summer must have burned their minds with everything else if this was their idea of danger.

His mouth is still hanging open when he thinks to be bitter about it.

“Fine. Who’s comin’ with me?”

But the dented bell is ringing again and his two seniors are leaving him, laughing and jesting to themselves out the door all while he stays with nothing but a poster, a ramshackle office, and a pitying marshal to wish him luck.

There is a silence as he stands, shocked. Then a small pat to his back.

“Come on. Let’s get you looked at.”

And oh, Arthur feels ever the fool for joining those two crooks.

. . . . .

After a hearty stitching and a, “You be careful, now!” he hears at his back, Arthur is once again in the mown yellow grasses out front. The sheriff really is too good a man for law work.

Sol is more of a silhouette in the coming darkness as he approaches her. He spares one last look at the town -- dusk has fallen, and no one is out -- and then at the paper and the joke it makes out of a murdering man.

“John Marston,” he reads aloud. “Last seen in Halla Creek.”

The wanted man looks like a bandit, but not much else. Harsh pencilling which could be thin stubble over his jaw, thin-ish eyes, and wild hair grown long. At one side, he seems to have deep scars on his face. Either that or the drawing is worse than Arthur had joked.

He rolls the poster and puts it in his saddlebag with other things he don’t think matter enough to him, and rides on out the gates as the new moon turns the world blue. He chases those darkening mountains, black with night.

Halla Creek is wolf territory, he thinks.

This ‘John Marston’ might just be more of a fool than the lot of them.

. . . . .

As Fate would have it, Arthur is right -- it just don’t bring him the joy he had imagined.

No doubt the lack of sleep helps little. By the time he has ridden out far enough for the dirt road to turn to trail, he loses sight of the greenery with how often his eyes shut, fighting his will. He misses the changeover in the trees when the pines make way for firs prickly to the touch and the heavy black sky loses itself in the climbing treeline. He wakes himself eventually, and can still watch the stars in this cutaway the path brings, which he does, longingly. ‘Has man ever made it to the stars?’ he thinks. ‘Will we ever?’

It would take a mad work of civilisation to do so. It never was man’s due to be near to the heavens like the birds. To defy the will of the world on that would take fearful creations -- and technology was, he always thought, just mankind rebelling against its place. Funny then that it might be the thing to bring them closer to nature, someday. For now this shy starlight from afar will have to do.

The stars blur for a moment -- smoke.

A pillar of smoke blocks them in thick grey, reaching up from the foot of a mountain pass. It is earlier than it should be. Halla Creek is still many miles further into the wilderness. It might be a different stranger, then. The wilds were a big home after all, and he had passed already groups of three and five men, none of which with his prized fool. Still, Arthur clicks his tongue, rocks his legs to tell Sol to prove her worth. She gallops and grunts, chases that fleeting grey where he can’t. The forest grows thicker all the while, and the paths unworn and untaken.

The fire has all but died when he finds it. It rests soundlessly, no crackling embers, and he curses the night that he may find a camp long abandoned.

He hops to the dirt irritated, steps hard enough to leave prints, as he makes his way closer. The forest looks almost unscathed by the sun, still green and lush and thriving around him. Through tall grasses he sees that the camp is makeshift, all rags and newly cut logs, but there is no better place for it. It is guarded, circled by dense woodland, but also marks a parting in the trees where it can be left in a hurry. A stream rushes only a short walk away, and there is often the feathered footstep of life, of deer, foxes. A man on his own could likely survive out here long enough if he knew what he was doing -- maybe longer than in a city, if he was a wanted man.

Arthur stalks closer to the camp. He looks for possessions, but finds only a dirt-brown coat over a log. The tent is cleared out, picked bare -- no, wait, a bedroll lies on the forest floor, clean and spread out under the tent roof. It’s a sign someone couldn’t have packed for the long haul. Whoever was here mustn’t have gone too far, wasn’t leaving altogether. They might still be close.

He rushes back to the centre, rests his fingertips on the campfire logs, still hot to his touch, and he curses when he realises he’s losing time before--

A curse, hoarse and desperate up north, further up the mountain. Then gunshots.

Arthur stills. ‘Wanted alive,’ he thinks.

He hopes God damns this bounty to Hell and back, making him run to Sol like a madman, on her back, restless, shouting at her to run -- all for fear the dumbass will get himself killed before Arthur can get paid for it.

They pass through crowded woodland and ferns, blued and black as the shadows cast grow heavier. A howl echoes by them, then -- a wolf, wolves, a pack of them. As Arthur rides further that howling turns more to a gnarly growling, and the sound reminds him of all wolves he has seen crowding around each other with only so much prey to share, hateful and asserting their strength in a desperate bid for meat. He whispers at Sol, urgently. She makes a scared, high-pitched whine, but soon he is rocked around and unstable with the quick footing, and he has to guide the horse so very closely else the spiny branches and broad trunks might down them both. It is hard riding, but they have been through gunfights together, have lived to see more lead and shot than most men ever dream to, and before long, the dangers of the forest clear to silt.

It is at the start of a slow stream where Arthur finally finds a man, bleeding, as a wolf tears into his leg. In the night blue, he looks more like a walking skeleton or the picture of Death himself -- with the black fabric covering his mouth, it is as if he is jawless, the lower half of his face gone missing. A Springfield lays limply on the pebbles.

A shot. The wolf yelps and falls. Arthur is holding his revolver, hears the startled splashing in the creek -- he shoots again. Another wolf falls, swept by the current. One more, two more. Some stragglers turn tail and flee. Arthur shoots them down without purpose, spurred by habit -- aims down in the thick of their coat, where the heart will be.

They fall, and soon, all he hears is a weary panting. He looks over to meet it.

The stranger is holding his leg, desperately. Stringed apart in pink and red, and it is hard to tell in the nighttime, but whittled away, the flesh seems to give way to a width of ivory bone. He might be shocked, might be relieved, might be angered or frightened -- Arthur can’t be sure, with the bandana worn over the man’s jaw. He can only make out the hair reaching the length of his neck and the glint of starlight in his eyes. The answer comes to him soon enough, spoken in an airy voice, a wind-swept voice, a wild voice.

“And who the hell might you be?”

Angered somehow, or threatened.

Arthur stares him down, thinking of whether he should keep the man in place with the warning of his pistol or holster it so the man is not scared into running. ‘Wanted alive,’ he thinks again, bitterly, and he puts the revolver in leather. He wipes his brow, and recalls dimly that the man had questioned him. “Morgan. Just was huntin’ prey out here.”

Not even a lie, if he thinks about it.

“That right?” the man is still speaking through the cloth, and his voice is all the more distant and buzzing underneath. It’s unsettling. “Don’t you know this place is dangerous, _Morgan?_ ”

Any hope of diplomacy is dashed -- Arthur wheezes. “Sure. It’s you that don’t, apparently.”

The stranger says something under his breath. Sounds like ‘bastard.’ Sounds like a small victory. “You’re a real joker, huh, Morgan?”

“It’s you that’s funny. Wearin’ a mask like that -- you down with a cold or something?”

The man, no, the _boy,_ bristles again. He has some of that bite that the wilds have. The wolves might have mistaken him for friend, snarling as he is, blood trailing into the thinner waters by his side. Movement quick and angry, he takes off the cloth. Pulls the midnight cotton from his mouth, his jaw, and--

Scars, left of his mouth.

Either Arthur is the luckiest man alive, or this here man lost a bet with the Devil.

“Shit, boy,” he breathes out, relaxes.

The boy now looking at him with narrowed, bewildered eyes, the boy bleeding and sweat-clad and wounded -- this is John Marston, his mark, and in the words of everyone who’s told him, a dangerous man.

Marston mustn’t be used to people relaxing after seeing his face in full. He makes for his Springfield, but doesn’t raise it. Must be more for the comfort of knowing he can do harm, as Arthur understands it. Then he tilts his head, bemused. “You don’t seem rattled in the slightest,” he says, slow.

Arthur don’t rightly care, anymore. To think he can sleep soon, God, he celebrates, laughs, lets his better judgement go. “Well, it’s just -- looks like wolves got to you long ago, with scars like that.”

He says it in the hopes of earning that same delightful indignation he’s met all night. He doesn’t expect the quick emotions passing the boy’s face: shock, embarrassment, and then flailing about as he is.

“Shut up, you-- you old man.”

Arthur tallies another victory. Each one has him giddy with a quick pink rush and tempted into gambling for another, his new pastime to keep him awake in the night. “I was right? Well, shit, I’m sorry! Must’ve been scary for a li’l boy like you.”

The boy stutters before he starts seething. Ain’t that just the _sweetest._

That heady high from pushing his luck has yet to pass, so Arthur takes another stab where he thinks it might cut deeper: “Shouldn’t boys like you be in school still?”

The boy stumbles back again, or all that he can with half a leg ripped, skin trailing like red jerky. He looks wounded, and not only by the torn flesh of his calf. “H-Hey! I’m plenty past that, asshole!”

Arthur knows it to be true even in the shadows. With soft skin like that, but hard edges to his face, his frame, he might be only about a decade younger than Arthur himself.

“Really?” Arthur grins anyway. “Looks like you could do t’be a bit smarter.”

And, oh, the boy seizes up, stills himself like a fawn, anger so complete he can’t even shake. Then he breathes out. A steady inhale, exhale -- a _marksman’s_ inhale, exhale, the breaths you take when you line up a shot in the sights and stare down beasts and bastards that need a killing, the breaths that keep you grounded and present. It’s terrifying to see that on the boy, yet Marston leaves his gun facing the ground. He doesn’t say much of anything either, until he hisses, sharp. His hands hurry to the blood at his leg.

Marston is still armed, of course, which gives Arthur pause. He tries stepping closer nonetheless -- he has his own gun should he appear less than accommodating, and there won’t be any bounty or gloating to bring home should the boy bleed out on him.

“Need a hand with that?” he offers.

The boy glares, then must realise it doesn’t look so threatening staring up from the ground, downed and wounded, saved by the very man before him who looks down from the height of his horse. “You a doctor ‘s well as a hero, Morgan?”

“Not a doctor,” Arthur says, “But not an idiot boy, neither.”

Marston makes an angry baying in the back of his throat, though he stays where he is, and keeps his rifle where it is by his side. He’s a sorry sight, looking resigned to the help or, worse, resigned to the thought that help might not come for him out here, might not find him deserving of it -- or maybe that is what his own thoughts tell him.

Arthur feels no better for thinking it, but it’s the most permission he’ll get, likely. He pulls himself off of Sol, and reaches for the weight of his belt, his satchel. The fur-lined pouch is full of most of the outland essentials -- salves, cures, liquor, herbs, clean cut cloth, and rope. He has the full first-responder selection at his disposal -- only limited, really, by how much he is willing to waste on this mark.

But Marston watches him carefully before he can take out the bare minimum. “Jesus. Maybe you are a doctor.”

It’s said so boyishly and astonished that Arthur caves, reaching for the pricier end of his kit. “An’ maybe you’re hopeless. What was you doin’ here, out in wolf country?”

The pause is heavy and chary. “Surviving.”

Arthur breaks apart ginseng and peppermint, disinfectants -- then rubs them pointedly in the boy’s wound. “Poor damn job of it.”

“Aghh, Jesus, fuck! Okay, I was running!”

That makes Arthur stop -- he knows the ill ugly truth of it, but the honesty in it all makes him wonder.

“Running?”

Marston goes quiet too then, not even breathing. His eyes have gone wide, brown turned black by fear and nightfall. A flash of his teeth and suddenly he jolts and jerks himself away, trying to make it some distance and failing miserably as he’s held down by his leg, still resting in Arthur’s grip. Trapped, and with less than a breath after that, he instead draws his gun, wincing as he holds it ready, maybe a pulled shoulder. The silence that comes this time is tense and strange -- the boy must know he’s caught, but oh, if only he knew how bad. And Arthur, though right madness it is, finds himself caught too: the words ‘wanted alive’ flash traitorously in his mind.

There he is, held at gunpoint all while he had planned to right the wrongs of a wanted man and set his leg well so he might be barred away in a near-comfort.

The scene is peaceful and dangerous. The serene line of the stream falters now and then behind them, making soft little noises as it moves onward, and there is the unknown dark of the forest on the far side of it, shifting with stranger darknesses that could be rodents, or hunters, or fallen firs alike. Red surrounds them all the while, pooling from the cool wolf corpses, and in the clustered flowers of the yarrow. The night sky is the ruler of it all, above them, and the stars smile impishly as the moon hides away in the clouds -- gathering clouds, storm clouds.

This deadlock could end in many ways. Some honest, some dangerous, and some dishonest, some safer.

Arthur sighs at himself and his sickening sincerity. Maybe the sheriff and his bluebird nature was influencing him, or maybe this wild boy and his earnest eyes were getting to his head.

“Now what could a John Marston be runnin’ from?”

He thinks it might be worth it for the raw despair that crosses the boy’s face, thinks it might be worth it, until the stock of a Lancaster Springfield is bearing down on him. Then he thinks that maybe those two men were right, maybe this were always a dangerous man. And he thinks maybe they were right when they found him all those years ago, youthful, silly, and bloodied by the blood of his own father.

“Arthur Morgan,” they had said, “You are one hopeless fool.”

The black that fells him rivals the sky -- he really is one hopeless fool.


	2. Petty curiosities.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Is that what scares you?” Marston says, curiously. “Being good, is that so bad?”

Sleep can do funny things to a man. The stillness contests death, makes you wish for it. The dreams fill forgotten holes in the mind where there is no light, fill them with colours and music, and hide the ugly memories a man won’t tell you when he wakes.

But not for Arthur, who starts awake feeling the careful warmth of tamed fire, washed away soon by soft rain against his skin -- the beginnings of a storm. It soothes him into telling every repressed regret the week has wrought him.

“Y’bastard, I... I didn’t take yer damn lackey, Colm,” he mutters, listless. “If he ain’t back he likely died goin’ after th’Riley fella that... deserted y’all... jus’ lemme go.”

He hears the crackling of rainfall and a campfire, and a whistling that brings it all together. An old tune, spread commonplace around the hinterlands. Sad old Roland, oh, sad ol’ Roland oh, growing old, growing alone, oh--

The warm sets him close to sleep again. Then the whistle ends abrupt like it had been in his head all along, and he hears a voice that isn’t warm, or Colm, at all.

“Colm? Did you say fuckin’ Colm O’Driscoll?”

There are no dreams for Arthur. When Arthur wakes in full, he is long tied to the present.

Rope burns draw red lines around his wrists, his legs, tighter than the bindings of that cellar he was held in nights before... how many nights? How many nights was he held captive, then, and how many nights have since passed, now?

No, he is hogtied, on his side, in the soil. It is wet, but not deep enough to be the makings of his own grave yet. Colm O’Driscoll wouldn’t give him the ease of a forest bed -- he should be strung up fighting gravity, or dead.

“I asked you a question.”

Arthur blinks. Sees the scars first, then the eyes.

He sees wolves and the wilds and the western manners he was taught to fear -- just as he had remembered them all.

“John Marston,” he says. “Thought I was meant t’be catchin’ you.”

“So you were huntin’ -- bounties, that is.”

His throat aches with it, but his voice comes slurred by sleep and just alert enough to be impressed. “Sure was,” and then, wry, “Morning, sunshine.”

There’s a fist in his face, a jab just right of his lips, though the hit leaves him more awake than hurt and makes little sense, as he is already hogtied and oldly wounded and sore, but then, this whole night makes little sense as it is.

“Mornin’ to you too, Morgan,” Marston drawls, thick, too, with sleep -- or the lack of it.

Turning tiredly into the soil, the dark of it is all Arthur sees, and mud all he feels against his face, cooling his hit skin. But if he listens, he can assume the sound of Marston, drawing closer, leaving the fire and logstool to stand, watching, before he steps away. Arthur wonders what the boy sees when he looks at him up close.

Feeling the gentle cruelty of the rain, he hates that he can’t excuse it all as some feverish summer dream that his mind thought up when boiled, another nightmare of his failings that never happened. He rolls over to watch the boy, thoughtlessly curious, and moved by pettier tendencies like the Devil’s spite.

Marston sits atop a log wearing that bear-pelt duster Arthur had seen in passing, and turning logs with a barbed sapling twig. It is still past-midnight darkness around them but greyed with cloud cover, and the fire casts their faces in honey gold. There is an idle intensity in how Marston goads the flames. Scars in the firelight, he looks more the way he had been drawn, the way the rumours had drawn him -- focussed and desert-frayed.

Arthur realises now sleep has left his eyes that Marston is cleaning a knife by the fire. The blade makes a curved crescent, small, a kind of gutting knife perhaps, and there looks to be blood along the edge. Flame in his eyes and the metal sheen of his killing tools, it makes him look all the more like the wilds -- hardy, weathered and with a burn that could prove deadly, or have you finding the beauty in it before it starved you.

The knife stops moving.

“Didn’t think you’d be an O’Driscoll,” Marston says.

Arthur would laugh if his throat weren’t so parched. “’Scuse me?” he barks.

The knife is turning again, ribbed side, flat side, ribbed, flat... it stops.

“Well, callin’ for Colm O’Driscoll in your sleep like that.”

The boy says it so plainly, like he is unaware of the ungodly things that could speak of, or aware and careless, isn’t that a thought? Arthur does chuckle now, and suffers for it -- coughs, violently, but sees no blood where he spits at the grass.

“Boy, you try bein’ flayed alive by the bastard.”

The boy goes quiet, maybe learns what shame is all in a few seconds. Unlikely, as he’s speaking again: “So that your real name?”

Arthur waits, stilted. “You mean... O’Driscoll?”

“Yeah.”

Then laughs, painful and open and swollen -- he might be catching a cold out here in the forest gum, or some other sickness that’s eating at his reason. “Marston, I dunno how t’lay this by you, but... the O’Driscolls aren’t all named O’Driscoll, y’know.”

The boy goes taut. “What?”

Says it, with a disbelief that is breathtaking -- this kid who can survive months of law chasers and lone forest, but has a furrowed brow, crossed eyes, as he thinks that maybe a gang of fifty odd men might not all be cousins like some plantation aristocracy. Quiet now, contemplating, he sits before the fire all homely, calmly. He is turning that gutting knife over in his grip too, maybe a tell, if Arthur were more a betting man, but he can’t think on it for long -- not when the boy then stops for the inexplicable.

He laughs.

A beautiful sound, scratchy, breezy, and somehow softer than his speech, winded and lacking in all that wild throatiness. It could fool any number of people, pretty sound like that -- that make him sound like a boy, and not a killer hiding out in the dark of a forest.

It almost deafens Arthur to the words: “Wait, y’mean to tell me I was callin’ you lot inbred fools for nothing?”

Arthur bares his teeth, as he should’ve done from the start. “I’m no O’Driscoll, boy.”

“Oh, I hit a nerve? I’m sorry, Morgan.” Marston holds up his knife, shrugging. “Meant to hit an artery.”

Arthur sees the sulphur yellow dancing in the boy’s eyes and thinks it could be dangerous, could be worth playing along for, letting him have another win. But seems his rationale is waking too, though it is a close thing.

“’Fraid not, Marston.” A hunch, but it feels surer than that, so he looks for what he remembers of the night, of a poster, Sol, wolves -- he sees one skinned near the fire -- blood, a rifle -- engraved and custom, a Springfield -- and he remembers the smell of mint. “On account o’ your leg,” he says, finally.

Marston scowls, and the firelight scatters a bit from his eyes when he looks to the ground, his leg.

Arthur can’t see it well. From here in the dirt, it’s blocked by the pile of logs warming them, and there’s a black cloth covering what he can see -- maybe the bandana he had seen, however long since he was last woke.

“How is it?” he asks.

The boy doesn’t seem to think him mocking, or is maybe too pained to think of it, too naïve -- he presses the wound curiously, then hisses, uncaring of manly things like shame and pride when he answers, “Absolutely Goddamn painful.”

And then the forgotten sight of them both comes home -- Arthur, hands up showing pale surrender, and Marston, armed and frightened and bleeding into the stream. There were no winners and there were no other choices, a cat’s game, which can now only end in his losing.

He wonders if the boy knows it, too. Marston, free to profit from this any way he sees fit: robbing this fool of a bounty hunter, getting his leg fixed with the easy coercion of his gun and then shooting for sure safety, or not, for whatever rest may come to him easier by the morrow. But there is only one way Arthur can leave from this richer for it, and it involves these ropes off his skin -- and around the boy.

Arthur is still waking to the world, however, and pushes the thought aside for heartless ones. “What time is it?” he asks, though he wonders when it truly mattered to him.

“Hasn’t been too long. I went easy on you,” Marston says. The ease with which he somehow makes such a smug thought sound sincere is curious. “Nearly one, accordin’ to your watch.”

Arthur groans, now that his mark has gone and robbed him -- robbed him of a pocket watch he had robbed from his father, the only gold easy to take off his body, not like the teeth -- as he writhes in rain-wet soil, like the sorry, sorry fool he is.

But Marston leaves it, down by the open satchel, as you might with a loan, and not fair game pickings.

Arthur takes stock of the camp anew at that, notes that the tent cover has been brought over to shelter the fire, and just shy enough of protecting him from the rain. It’s a funny thought, a small pettiness. Then he notes the greater pettiness, lying in his satchel on the weeds with the watch, picked and rummaged and no rope in it.

Pettiness, God -- he breathes, “You used _my_ rope?”

“Why would I waste mine?” Marston answers. Then smaller, bitter, “Hard to buy much anythin’ with a bounty on your head, y’know.”

Arthur doesn’t know. He never thought once about the small struggles of wanted men, only how they struggled in rope or chains. “Huh.”

The boy seems to take that as some kind of win -- petty, how strange, maybe there are things shared by them both that might’ve made them close, if the way of the world willed it. Those eyes of his soften to make a curious little look, though his words find an open honesty that Arthur learned, long ago, to forfeit. “Frankly, Morgan, I don’t know what to do with you.”

Arthur chuckles, and tastes soil -- to think his mark was wondering a thing like that. Then he answers, startled by his own honesty, “Jus’ shoot me.”

Marston makes a shriek trapped in his neck -- like it weren’t right, of all things, for a man wanted for murder.

“C’mon. You want to, I want you to,” Arthur drones thickly, not quite sure how much he means it. “Y’can use my revolver too, wouldn’t you like that?”

He can see it now, the papers. ‘Man dies in desert nowhere, bound and shot through with his own revolver.’ Well, maybe not so -- journalism seemed to fear the dark humour of the world. Maybe something tamer: ‘Bounty hunter killed by bounty in Halla Creek.’ And the closing line might be a, ‘Beware,’ for good measure, to preach that they were warning folk away when, in doing so, they only tempted more hopeless men into finding their deaths.

“I’m not shootin’ you!”

Marston is shouting, biting. It’s loud enough and too damn early for it that Arthur wishes he could move with more freedom, if only to cover his ears. “Fuckin’ hell, Marston! You wanna be caught?!”

“Well, I didn’t tie you up jus’ t’kill you! Christ’s sake.”

Marston comes across as offended, nearly. There’s a shrill desperation in his tone -- an exasperation that Arthur thinks might be more suited to Sean if you told him he weren’t good for a job, more suited to his foolish conceit and Irish slurring, “Ain’t nothin’ I can’t do, silly Englishman.”

If that were true, would Sean come for him? Oh, he would likely fall foolishly somewhere halfway along, but might at least try, for the bragging rights after.

“Forgive me for thinkin’ a murderer might commit murder,” Arthur says, bleakly.

A pause that don’t belong. “So you alone?”

This sickly feeling comes over him all a sudden, with the thought that he might drop Dutch’s name. “Don’t think that matters none.”

“So not an O’Driscoll, but not alone,” Marston says, this sly gambler’s attentiveness brought to the front. Were all killers like that? Defensive and dangerous -- that’s a tendency Arthur can almost understand, then, if it is.

He supposes he might be a gambling man himself. “I’m serious about offin’ me, boy.”

Marston looks up from his knife, only to regard him quietly.

“Think about it a damn second. Best case for you, I fix your leg an’ annoy you none. Best case for me, I get outta ‘ere with you on my horse for money in my pocket. Ain’t any way those two things can happen a’once.”

Marston’s eyes go softer, somehow, dark but sweet like a liqueur. “Honest, aren’t you?” he hums. “It’s your name too, isn’t it? Morgan. You’re not even lyin’ when you should be, an’ you know it.”

Arthur knows it, but this boy might just know more -- know too much, and that scares him quiet.

They listen to rain and the fire and horned owls in the trees awhile. The night is still a navy colour, only a few hours lighter than before he had sleep beaten into him. It was a poor sleep, a dreamless sleep, his first sleep in days and barely worth the trouble -- and that is the excuse Arthur holds himself to for the mistake he makes next.

“There any yellowin’ or white stuff?”

Marston stares him blankly. “What?”

To think that his misplaced kindness, his mistake he’ll be feeling for the rest of his empty life, is met with nothing but dumb confusion. “Your wound, boy. I’m askin’ if infection’s takin’ on.”

The boy pulls at his black rags -- it makes a wet sound as he pulls it off his skin, but then he speaks over it. “Just looks like blood. And bone, maybe.”

“Good,” Arthur says, though his mind tells him otherwise like it should -- should, like how this boy should be in a cell by now, or how he himself should be long buried.

“You makin’ fun of me? Don’t tell me you did somethin’ to it, or I--”

“What I _did_ was keep you out of fever, Marston, no need’a get up.” There comes a ringing in his ears, above the sounds of the wilderness. “An’ stop your hollering. ‘Less you wanna be caught?”

Marston goes quiet, and the fire keeps burning, taking.

Arthur sighs -- hears something, someone, like Hosea laughing at him when he were of teen age, before he asks, “You touched those cures, yet?”

“Which is that?”

“Crown label, white ‘n’ gold -- Jesus, kid, how’ve you lived this long?”

“You’re jus’ a damn doctor an’ you won’t admit it!”

“It’s common Goddamn sense!”

“Well, fuck your common sense, Morgan,” the boy says, spurred on by pettiness, but he pops the cork and drinks away tens of dollars of drink worth more than fine brandy.

“Now, that,” Arthur says, just as much spurred by pettiness as he’s always been, and not because of this boy, he tells himself, “is gonna keep your sorry ass alive.”

Marston throws the cork at him -- Arthur winces, ‘cause God, it hits his head, good shot. Then the boy spits, offers his thanks: “Tastes like fuckin’ liquorice.”

“Sweeter than you, it might be.”

“Go to Hell, Morgan.”

Arthur scoffs, “Some thank-you.”

It’s not that he had expected better, in fact, he was still waiting for the worst to be over -- bloody, hateful, biting punishment. The whole few hours between blissful nothing and the mires of yesterday come back with the air in his lungs, and go out in a long sigh. Between utter dependence and cigarette burns and a shot to his shoulder, hell, he’s nearly thankful -- even this, hogtied by his own bounty, even this could be worse. Colm would’ve made sure of it.

And yet, his long-awaited thank-you comes in a different form, a different kindness, than the one any sane man would be expecting. Marston, stepping closer and stooping low -- gutting knife glinting white.

He cuts the rope -- cuts at it, his fuck-you to common sense clear as the sudden clap of lightning above.

Arthur is too put-off to offer his own thanks, then. “What the hell d’you think you’re doing, boy?!”

This John Marston really is a fool, to be doing this. More a fool than Bill, flighty Bill who would sooner shoot a man than say thank-you, more a fool than Sean who might kick a man when he’s down to feel bigger than he is -- more a fool than Arthur Morgan, who woke in his own rope, caught by his own bounty.

More a fool than anyone, when he says, easily, “Sayin’ thank you. Asshole.”

It’s as Arthur stands that he feels his gun belt still on him, still heavy. As he walks a little closer, holds the boy’s shoulders and shakes, thinking he can shake some sense of danger into this innocent boy with blood dried on his hands -- his own blood. “I was goin’ to drag you in, you should’a shot me!” That’s not it, no, he should still be bringing the boy in of course, so he tries again, “Shoot me, damn it!”

Marston winces, and Arthur lets go, huffing. He remembers that nasal breathy noise -- the boy made it when he held his rifle.

“Fuck, okay, fine. Be a fool,” Arthur says, maybe even to himself, for when he continues, quietly, watching the ground. “Shoulder bad?”

There comes a laugh, well-deserved -- maybe the whole forest is laughing at the both of them, now.

“Sure. Makes a clickin’ feeling when I move.” Marston leans into his log seat, resting on his laurels, hands behind where he rests. “You gonna fix that, too, doc?”

It’s obvious now -- the boy is laughing at him, laughing at the way he wars over it all where he stands, soaked in that unlikely summer rain.

He mumbles. “Are you asking?”

Marston smiles, looking pleased as punch -- catching onto something, something Arthur doesn’t quite know yet, but this boy might’ve just sussed out the path of the stars, might’ve plotted them himself with how he eases into the camp like they’re not strangers.

“Dunno,” he says, still grinning. “Kinda curious to see what you do, now.”

Arthur sputters. “What, you’re lettin’ me kill you?”

Marston closes his eyes, tired and smug. “Well, di’n’t that poster say I was wanted alive?”

The boy’s been through his saddlebag, then. Sol must be safe too, and much alive, if this boy's careless streak is any sign. “Sure, but I’ve the gun,” Arthur pressures.

“But d’you have the guts, Morgan?”

There’s an uneasy pause where Arthur sees the orange-hot fire dancing in his eyes, and the gutting knife turning in his grip. A dangerous man, Arthur hears now, resounding true in a voice that might be the sheriff, or Hosea, or Dutch and them all bleeding together, damning him, demeaning him -- right, as he thought they hadn’t been in his childish defiance, his childish arrogance he should have grown out of and was paying for dearly.

He growls. “I’m not scared of shootin’ some kid dead.”

“Then do it! C’mon, I’ll give you an easy start!”

“I don’t much like this game you’re playing, Marston.”

Marston speaks again, with that sly knowing that doesn’t suit him, or suits him too well, hell, Arthur can’t be sure of anything anymore.

“I think,” he says, when he means he knows, “You’re a good man, Morgan.”

“Don’t you start.” Arthur hates it, hates hearing this preaching from a lowly criminal who shouldn’t know good from bad like nooses from manger ties to keep horses from running.

He whistles, then, for Sol to get him out of here, hears her somewhere far off, maybe that streamline where he had left her, hooves against the mountain -- not dead, like she should be, if this boy had any sense to do it. He goes for his satchel too, on the ground, and the boy doesn’t stop him then, either.

“Is that what scares you?” Marston says, curiously. “Being good, is that so bad?”

“Don’t want t’hear that from you,” Arthur bites out.

Sol comes, calmly, into the campsite. Arthur reaches for her bridle, but then stops himself when he hears a painful whine. The boy is holding his shoulder, pressing at his collarbone.

Arthur stands with the weight of every bad decision he's made holding him there.

He goes up to Marston anyway, keeps him in place -- no struggle, the boy just lets him, just waits with this young curiosity -- and then Arthur holds out his arm, elbow bent, pulls it outward, grips the muscle of it just as the boy begins hissing at him, and then he rolls it back, forward.

He hears it, a snap -- maybe his mind snapping, to even have thought to do anything.

The boy swears. It’s a petty thing to be put at ease by, but Arthur isn’t above much anything now. Then he stares, looking somehow more dog-eyed as Arthur gets back on his horse, and he has to crane up to meet those eyes on horseback.

“Did you jus’ fix it?” he asks, rolling his shoulder with complete wonder.

Arthur wonders exactly when he lost his mind -- maybe sooner than Dutch, of all people, maybe his mind left with Mary years ago.

He takes hold of the bridle, desperate to ride on out, and Sol feels his fear through the rope and wears it. All while Marston steps up to him, dangerously -- dangerous, and he thinks he might understand how now, more than anyone could, it’s not a normal danger at all, it’s not in his charges, it’s whatever this is that he’s brought out into the sparse morning light, and brings out again when he tilts his head to Sol’s, softly.

Arthur doesn’t leave, yet. Not sure why, but it’s something binding, like those ropes that had been ‘round his wrists, pulling, something trapping him, a gallows’ noose -- he just watches those eyes, stilled by something beyond him and watching umber brown as it watches him.

“I heard good folk are liked by animals,” Marston says. “Wha’ d’you think, Morgan?”

“I think you’re mad, John Marston.”

Marston laughs, oh, and it is dangerous, to be staying here, to be listening to that loose laughter.

“Y'know, if you stayed awhile,” he says, “I’d say you an’ I might get along.”

With all things he fears and can’t quite ever understand -- like with Mary, like with most people -- Arthur runs away, and doesn’t look back.

“Hey, wait, Morgan--”

Arthur leaves, every newborn feeling outweighed by this sinking fear that starts in with the worst of the storm.

He rides out, far, and too quick, too uneasy, enough to feel how it makes Sol quiver a little under the worry of it all. The trees are all shadowy blurs beside him, the sky flashing white every now and then like a lighthouse for travellers who've lost their way. Sol strains her legs to keep up with his whims, and Arthur feels just as strained, his heart trapped in his ribs but thrashing helplessly at the cage.

It dawns on him once the trees turn to softer pines, the first sign they’ve reached the outskirts of Fallswood, that he isn’t sure how he feels, then. If he’d had Marston in tow he would’ve earned himself half a cut of fifty dollars, leaving him twenty-five less broke, all in exchange for a young idiot that he, regrettably, don't think is bad enough to be in a cage -- don’t think could be caught or trapped in one, either, don’t think being without freedom suited a boy like that, like putting a coyote behind bars.

Twenty-five dollars, and if that’s all a life is worth, he’s not sure how he feels about it. As Sol sends him home, the rain beats down on him, and he feels that, knows it to be what it is -- cold, wet scorn.

At least the rain washes the dirt in his face -- the proof of his losing, still on his lips.

God is real, and laughing at him.

. . . . .

Thunder breaks out in the heavens when he arrives. Fallswood is merrier than he had left it -- there are lanterns about, and the light and laughter around the saloon. It looks more inviting now than he's ever seen it.

He walks.

When he enters, the saloon looks at the man at the door, the man looking more like a drowned rat. He is empty-handed, and hours late.

“Mr Morgan!”

Simon Pearson is ignorant to it all, no expectations, waving him down to the bar. Suppose a bartender who sees all kinds of people at their worst would be ill-suited to any lofty expectations. Arthur sees the tall hat, then the thick of his moustache, before he does the man.

“Mr Pearson.” Arthur feels eyes still on him, waiting. He spies Hosea and Sean among them -- one which surprises him, and one which surprises no one, the damn Irishman, drinking his liver away. Then he breathes, heavy, “Whiskey.”

“Just a neat--”

“Jus’ get me somethin’ I won’t remember.”

The tense silence doesn’t last long. Hosea comes over -- he hears it before he sees it, that old walk of his, the hobbling footfalls, as he sets himself into a rubbed leather stool.

“You don’t look bloody,” he says.

Arthur grunts.

“You don’t look happy, either.”

“That ever matter?” Arthur says, before he’s even taken a sip -- he’s no sad drunk, just a sad man. He looks at Hosea then, who starts to smile like a fox with a mouse, or Dutch, with his talk of untethered countries.

He doesn’t say anything, just laughs, just whips the whole bar into laughter, knowing he's won.

“Simon, all his drinks are on me!” he shouts, turning to face the counter, eyes gleaming even when Arthur can no longer see them.

Arthur downs his drink.

“Ladies and gentlemen, our boy Arthur has just learned of failure!”

The bar howls.

“Pass me another, Mr Pearson,” Arthur calls, over the sound of roiling laughter.

The first time Arthur has ever come home from a job empty-handed, and of course the town will hold him to it ‘til the dry months end.

Hosea has the bar hanging on his words, ears pricked and tails wagging like old Dobermans around pulled jerky. Even Dutch comes by at some time Arthur can't place, spared time for the occasion before he was called aside for another bother. Others stop by to see the fuss -- listening to the melodrama that is Hosea’s recount of the day, the bounty, the coming home muddied that Arthur will be reliving when he lies awake.

“Would you believe it?” Hosea asks, and how the men do, even as he speckles lies and half-lies in his telling: “An aspiring man of art by day, and most barbarous gunman by night! Never has there been a more wild man than John Marston!”

‘Man of art’ has Arthur closing his eyes so he feels less urge to gouge them bloody. “Pearson. Shot.”

A full glass thunks beside him, liquid gold. Pearson nurses it, tightly.

“Mr Morgan, you shouldn’t drink so much,” he says, before passing the glass slow and stingy. “You’re probably in for a long day, but it’s still light out.”

Arthur pulls at the pocket watch on his belt. He has to squint to read it: barely five at dawn, but wasn't it dark out only moments ago? Pearson might be right, he thinks, but questioning why the time of day matters for even a passing moment has him finding that he don’t care much at all. The whiskey-full glass weighs nice in his hold.

He hears then, blurry -- two, four men crowding around him, so excitable their questions hum together, or Arthur really has downed too much swill.

All he hears clearly is John Marston, John Marston over and over, haunting him with the ghost of the man.

The glass is half-empty when he slaps it down. “Gen’lemen... would y’kindly piss off?”

They laugh, clap their hands together -- a few more draw a circle around him like children poking a bear. Bear -- he sees that bear-pelt coat behind his lids.

Arthur growls, and his tumbling mind has him leaning over the bar, muttering into crossed arms.

“This why y’shoot people, Marston?”

He might even understand it, well as a drunken man can, as the circle around him begins howling amusement. The poisoned part of his mind wishes he were an outlaw. The poisoned part of his mind wishes Marston might be here, so he could off them in his stead.

“Another one, Pearson,” Arthur mutters.

He drinks, and the drinks keep coming.

They burn, like men at the stake.

The story hounds on, with Hosea weaving between round tables and stump chairs as he owns the stage, the parquet floor, the chorus of men choosing to sing that blues tune of a failing gunslinger, and it is as if they knew it would torment Arthur most. The second verse goes on: sad old Roland, oh, sad and growing old, he walks alone, an empty hold--

The lights of the bar go dim.

... sad old ...

... oh ...

... alone ...

... empty ...

...

. . . . .

The sleep from alcohol is no kinder than the sleep from a rifle to the head -- Arthur wakes deeply hungover, fallen from his seat, fallen from grace, and with a headache that rivals divine judgement.

The bar is empty, well into closing hours for the day, and Pearson is cleaning the counter. Just as Arthur rises, holding the edge to steady his legs.

“Don’t touch that!” Pearson chides. “I just cleaned it, and my last cleaner walked out on me.”

“Which was that?”

“Mrs Adler. Psychopathic, I do believe -- I was held at knifepoint, Mr Morgan.”

Arthur makes a nasal acknowledgement, careless, and then holds the bench with both hands.

“Arthur Morgan!”

Arthur holds up a hand, then rummages through his satchel -- it bothers him that his cash is all there, as if he had never left home. He leaves a tip on the counter in apology and in asking, “I do anythin’ stupid last night?”

“You mean this morning,” Pearson says, smartly, taking the cash with distaste. "And what counts as stupid?'"

“More than usual,” Arthur clarifies, barely.

“Hmm, well, not much.” Pearson takes out a couple glasses, drying them, wiping them -- they make squeaking noises. “You drank yourself sad, Hosea started telling talltales of some man he dubbed ‘Valhalla’s Keeper’ or some nonsense.”

Arthur sighs. “Wasn’t Marston, was it?”

“That was it,” Pearson says, indifferent to the hundred kinds of suffering he can see in the man before him. “Mind if I ask?”

“Very much. Yeah.”

“Okay, I hear you.” Then Pearson puts the glasses under the counter, and begins work on the wood again. “You kept damning him in your sleep.”

Arthur groans, wondering why it is that he must only call for such Godless people in his sleep. That and Mary, if he’s had enough to drink -- Pearson has told him that, enough times, but not much anymore. There might be something lonely about that.

“Anythin’ particularly damning?” he asks, a little fearing of his drunken self.

Pearson hums, amused under that near-walrus moustache. “Why, just that you would cut off his good leg or something or other. That not damning enough?”

Arthur breathes, some held breath he never does notice. “No, I’ve done worse, an’ I’ll probably do worse.” He picks up his hat from the floor. “Thank you, anyway.”

Dusting it against himself, he puts it on and then heads for the noon light he can see outside the top and bottom of the saloon doors -- these gaps, where the doors don’t quite meet the archway, like how a vest leaves the sleeves and collar bare, by design, however pointless.

Pearson adds on, in passing, “You said he had nice eyes, if that’s what you’re after.”

Arthur stops.

In lieu of asking for another shot, or slapping himself stupid, or slamming the doors in Pearson’s face like it might change a thing, he finds himself speaking honestly -- “Least my drunk self’s no liar,” he says.

The barkeep lets him leave with the weight of that, the weight of his own honesty just like Marston had called him out for, and a concerned farewell under his breath.

Out in the street, the sun burns.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Note: hot diggity damn, I made a couple errors in this chapter. Fixed and forgotten. You hopefully won't notice?


	3. Silver dapple, black silver.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two bounty hunters and a hundred-dollar-man ride into Hillsbury.

In the days after, Arthur lets work take over him, working down his marrow. If he’s possessed by the Devil himself maybe it will excuse him from the unreligious thoughts that he wakes to. The days come and go, pastel sunlight and July haze. Sun is tough on his skin, Micah tough on his patience, and it is all forgotten hours of blue sky and the weakly blue paint of the sheriff’s office.

That is where he is this morning, when the marshal greets him.

Not once looking up, never looking up. It might be rude manners, but Arthur respects it, somehow. The marshal might be the only lawman who works in hundred-degree heat, or at all, as the city offices would show. “Dutch was looking for you,” he says.

It’s not hard for Arthur to act like he’s hard of hearing, not when he hardly hears the words at all -- not when a fresh-inked poster hangs over the window, blocking the view of the town with a cursed face.

John Marston, who -- between Hosea’s talltales and Arthur’s failings and the sick-spreading word around idle towns -- now has a hundred-dollar bounty.

Arthur doesn’t take it with him.

. . . . .

The last week of July passes between catching outlaws, cashing in, drinks, and fitful nights. The American Dream, as it was made to be. Look at that, he’s living as any fine American should, and Dutch isn’t even here to see it.

Not for lack of trying, though: the man has been upping his ‘coincidences’ of them meeting, nearly finding him in broken general stores out in towns he’ll forget the name of, all for wanting to ask about his faults.

Dutch has his way, in the end. Suppose that explains most everything about the man.

“There you are, Arthur.”

Arthur is on an outcrop where the cathedral sits -- or perhaps a church as it’s of small stature, being only halfway built and halfway torn apart. He is so very unbelonging that any other man would never guess to find him there, although it’s not the holiness he’s seeking but the view of free plains out by the horizon in the ending summer weather, the way the world shrinks from above. A city sits on the edge, eating up the outland grasses. It’s a sad sight, like a tide falling over the shore, slow, but sure as gravity.

“Oh. Dutch.” Arthur offers weakly-feigned surprise. “I heard you were lookin’ for me.”

“And you didn’t find me?” Dutch says, pointed. But he joins him in watching the grasses and the city-grey buildings of Hawthorne, bleeding into the wilderness.

“Figured you’d be busy _planning,_ ” Arthur returns.

Dutch laughs. “Oh, I’ve always got a plan, Arthur.”

“I know.”

And he does, he just never quite knows what it is.

Dutch smiles, fond -- and then starts in bold, straight to the heart of things. “I heard of your exploits,” he says.

The phrasing makes Arthur stare. “Y’mean, me gettin’ exploited?”

“Now, I wasn’t going to say it, to be _kind,_ but if you’re so willing -- yes.” He squints at the sun. “How does failure feel, my boy?”

Arthur winces, counters despite it: “Well, _you_ wouldn’t need me to tell you that.”

“Ah, that’s all in the pursuit of happiness,” Dutch says, easily. Maybe the only man who knows Arthur well enough to take the caustic remarks with a father’s pride -- or the only man who hears so many they start to go blunt.

This failure hasn’t brought Arthur any happiness, though. He looks to Dutch, and wonders if he’s the same.

Dutch has a wistful calm in his gaze, not quite happiness as he watches over the distant landscape, but maybe the ghost of it. The view is all blue-yellow light and Douglas firs and the sun sinking, but it’s anyone’s guess what he sees. Time moving on, perhaps -- with, or without them.

But his talk is warm optimism.

“You can always try again, Arthur,” he says. “This isn’t the be-all and end-all, and I’m sure-- who was it?”

Arthur turns back to the sun, away from his eyes. “Marston.”

“Yes, that’s it. Marston. I’m sure you’ll get another chance. This Marston boy won’t be brought in anytime soon, after all.”

That makes him glance over. “Why’s that?”

Dutch makes some waving of his hands between him and Arthur. “Trust me,” he says, like time and time again, and then, “I understand us dangerous folk.”

Arthur trusts him, but doesn’t trust himself and his honesty. He’s close to saying, “It’s different,” or, “I thought so, too, but--”

And so comes the first and last time Micah saves him -- saves him from finding out the pain of what he wants to say.

“Hey, Dutch!” he says, grinning high as he saunters past the church, “I found somethin’ I think you’ll like plenty.”

Dutch looks at Arthur first, before he turns to Micah. “Things coming along?” he asks.

Micah’s straw hair falls over his forehead -- heavy with sweat, or snake-oil, or whatever else unfortunate that nature can put into a being without it dying. At least it covers the greywater pale of his eyes. “Comin’ along just fine.”

It occurs to Arthur that he doesn’t know what they’re talking about, though maybe that’s not as unusual as it once was. “Where you headed?” he asks.

Micah answers him. Usually wouldn’t, but maybe it’s a show of goodwill for Dutch. “Hawthorne.”

Big cities and Micah Bell -- Arthur tries not to think that it’s two things he hates in the one place. “And do I get the glory of hearin’ what business you have in the city?”

“Now, now,” Dutch calms him. “Of course you can hear it, dear Arthur. But unfortunately,” he smiles, still too fond for his words, “you can’t avoid me while doing so. Are we clear on that?”

Giving orders like Arthur is a stubborn colt. It makes him too nostalgic to be angry. “Yeah, guess so. I’m,” he pauses, not used to ‘sorry.’ “I’m a fool,” he says instead.

Dutch sifts through his hair, like it’s all him and the Golden Boy and old summers gone by. “That you are, Arthur. That you are.”

Arthur could ask now, and nearly does, if it’ll get his thoughts away from dark eyes, but he likely won’t understand the words anymore. Words like trust, and doubt, and faith. He’s written them, but no one’s been there to tell him what they mean.

Seems like where Arthur can’t say ‘sorry,’ Dutch struggles with ‘goodbye.’ He only pats his old protégé on the shoulder, waving at the plains as he speaks. “Would you take Lenny out there, Arthur? See if you can’t teach him something about sourcing or scouting.”

Arthur has only old words. “Okay, then.”

Micah and Dutch leave him at the cathedral, and he thinks this might just be what faith is -- letting things happen, letting the two of them leave, all while knowing nothing good can come from it.

A crow caws above, sitting on the cross.

. . . . .

So Arthur takes Lenny along hoping to scout out Niles, a farming town further north -- north, because he knows how the boy will feel if they head anywhere further south.

Lenny is a green recruit. With a name like Leonard Summers anyone could think that he hardly fits in with the rest of them, and as if only to draw him further from fitting, he was born into this world with dark skin like his parents before him.

“We’re going to Niles?” he asks, just as they’re mounting up. “I’ve read about it. Heard there was a shooting there recently, if you can believe it.”

Arthur doesn’t blink. “I sure can.”

He takes Sol out, rides quick past the gates of Fallswood hoping he can leave the town behind. He’ll be back before long, but the impression of freedom may serve him well.

The northern wilderness is barer -- still within Breaker County, but more rolling hills and farmland. The crags and rocky mountains begin to lie low as they ride on, passing tall trees one moment -- and then none, hardly any greenery at all. Deep greens turn straw just as they reach wheat fields and grain crop. Before long even the path turns to gold, the summer grass overgrown.

“We should maybe walk from here,” Arthur says. Leaving Sol behind leaves a sore feel in his chest, but she’ll come running with a whistle. She always has.

Lenny can’t leave it at that, of course. “Why?”

“Well, Niles is close enough for it,” Arthur offers, reminding himself that he’s meant to be teaching the kid. “Close enough, an’ these locals get a bit... antsy, with armed folk ridin’ in on horseback.”

Lenny shrugs, letting his horse bite the turf as they walk across dead soil.

They walk on, talking, but the talking is strange with him, too many questions and an eagerness for learning that Arthur can’t understand. He is a bright boy, you can tell in the gentle intelligence of how he holds himself, and how he is mindful of thoughts they had all lost from growing into their work: “If you shoot a killer because he shot a man, what does that make you?”

Though maybe there are some thoughts better off not having. Arthur is learning that more with each passing night.

“We’re not killers, Lenny,” he says, more reassuring than sure of it. “No more than lawmen, anyway.”

“I still don’t know if I can do these ‘dead or alive’ jobs, then.”

And Arthur wouldn’t want him to, if he’s being honest. “That’s fine,” he says, and hopes it is.

He’s not sure he could like learning the way Lenny does; there are too many awful things to be made wiser to. But Lenny is a boy that cares, a boy that reads, a boy that thinks for himself. If he were lucky and the world were blind to his complexion as it is blind to the horrors of all men who walk it, well, he would not be here with them at all. Lenny would be caring for others, if they cared about him beyond his looks -- he would make a good doctor.

A good doctor, not like Arthur, who would sooner hurt people without willing it just from the rough of his care. A doctor, God, he laughs at the thought -- what had the boy said? You’re jus’ a doctor an’ you--

“Arthur?”

He rights himself. “Sorry, what was that?”

The world doesn’t wait to hear Lenny speak, though it is sadly not the first time, and hardly the last.

In the grass, in the shadows they cast, a bullet is in the ground before them. The blaring crack rings out -- loud, long, the song of a rifle. It’s singular and out of place.

Lenny is in cover before he can hear that it’s no threat.

No threat, no, not when the shot was so close to hitting them as that. It’s purposeful, warding them off, those damn locals getting gutsy, or--

“You’re pretty careless, Morgan.”

A shot in greeting.

Arthur’s heart wavers, burns. He blames the shock of almost welcoming the Reaper, and not that his ears are tuned to the rasp, his eyes finding that rum-dark gaze on the hilltop so effortlessly. He blames instinct, scouting the Godawful good firing position the man has taken up in the crest of the hill. The man standing there, his doubts and fears incarnate.

John Marston, his Springfield resting on a good, steady shoulder -- good because of Arthur, deciding it should be.

“How’d I do?” Marston says through a smile.

John Marston, more dangerous than he’s ever seen him.

Arthur doesn’t say it’s a good shot, a good aim, a good greeting. “I told you t’shoot me, not scare poor Lenny half to death.”

Their talk flows like drink as if they’d been talking just yesterday, or their whole lives, and he knows the laugh is coming before it does. Something about that is wrong, but the man doesn’t wait to let him find why. “He’s with you, then? The dark fella?”

Lenny tenses beside him, bowed down behind a jutting rock.

Arthur narrows his eyes.

“That a problem?”

Marston makes a simple, flippant gesture. “I mean, sure, it ruins your ‘lone hunter’ charm.”

It should be unsurprising that the boy doesn’t care for prejudices with his talk of honesty, and wrongdoing, and killing, like all men would live and die the same. Arthur still eases hearing it, and eases -- eases too much, for a man just shot at, for a man so close to death, that deathly glint in the dirt by his feet.

Eases enough for Lenny to spare him a sidelong glare, muttering, “Trust Arthur Morgan to be friends with some trigger-happy freak.”

His throat goes dry.

Marston grins, wide and proud like he’d won from the start, and maybe he had. “Arthur Morgan, was it?”

The sun is bright behind him, winking, as he rests his rifle along the breadth of his shoulders and behind his neck, and his grin turned cunning with knowing, with knowing that he was right all along -- that he was right to think that Arthur Morgan was a fool who would so carelessly bare his name. You’re not even lyin’ when you should be, an’ you know it--

Arthur breathes in, tightly.

“Hold on, you didn’t know?” Lenny asks, peeking out from the rock now to face this impossibility. He turns to Arthur, creases in his face and still riding some of that first fear -- but sharp. “Arthur, who the hell is this guy?”

And Arthur is thankful, thankful but terrified of his luck in having Lenny with him today: Leonard Summers, so green and fresh to their world that he doesn’t recognise the wanted man before him like a cross in the sights. If he were anyone else-- Arthur lets the thought go before it hurts him.

He can’t answer Lenny, can’t say, ‘John Marston, wanted for killing and robbery and kidnapping and all other things you hate.’

And Marston, grinning impossibly wider on that hilltop -- he knows it, like he knows most anything.

“My bad, Lenny,” he says. Then with the flair and practised ease of doing it so often, “Pleased t’meet ya. I’m Jim Milton.”

He lies, just enough of an edge to each syllable of the name, as if saying, ‘See how easy it is, Morgan?’

‘See what you should’ve done, so you wouldn’t suffer for the rest of your days?’

Arthur sees it, and then hears it painfully loud.

“Your friend _Arthur,_ here, jus’ helped me out the other day,” Marston says, trying the name on his tongue with a shameless lilt -- and liking it, if his smile is as true as he is. “Ain’t that right, Arthur?”

Spoken in a breath that makes it sound unburdened by every mistake tied to it; Arthur might like the way his name sounds too, said like that. Shame damn him to his death.

Arthur could, maybe should, send Lenny out on his own, now. The boy is green but a bright, bright green -- he would catch on before long, would notice that there’s nothing safe about the way Marston slings the rifle over his bones like it belongs there, part of his frame.

But it’s not Lenny’s fault that he’s here watching a man’s mistakes catch up with him.

“Look, M--Milton,” Arthur trips, and trying to warn him far away: “I’m out here with Lenny showin’ him the ropes. Lookin’ for _work_ and the like.”

Marston is wise to that too, and eases past it. “Oh, bounties? There’s a few up in Hillsbury.”

Lenny all but jumps out, eager and blind to what he’s walking into like it’s nothing worse than the stale afternoon sun. “Hillsbury? What have they got?”

It’s an emptier town past Niles, further into wide pastures and flatlands. A good town to be riding out to, easy and safe and too open to be hiding danger, and the townspeople more forthright in their welcome than anywhere in Niles. That is what has Arthur on alert.

The boy had asked him, but he never did think to ask if Marston was alone. Hillsbury would make a good stay for many wanted men, as word scarcely travels to a place so surrounded by barren plains. It would make good territory for snares and ambushes, simple work in stranded, unfamiliar land like that -- which is what Arthur is thinking when he looks up, guarded.

“Oh, a few easy ones,” Marston says, looking over to Lenny. “I think there was an accountant goin’ for three hundred.”

The perfect job for a new recruit like Lenny -- perfect, so perfect, Arthur has to pause. “He wanted dead?”

“Alive.”

As if the boy knew that was the best answer he could give. Arthur fears it, gauging where the lies start and end -- and coming up empty. “And an accountant, you say?”

It’s like the moment he speaks, Marston grins something harrowing. He’s stepping forward now, approaching slow down the hill, swinging his rifle lazily. “Mm-hmm. Slippery little bastard, word is. Easy prey, but, well, hard to pin down.”

He meets Arthur’s eyes, his own dark from the shade of his hat.

Marston has candid eyes, and a confident speech like he could convince Lenny of anything, tell him that he were only a down-on-his-luck rancher out north and not clear keen with a gun. Arthur wants to believe that too -- but all he can think of is how the boy knows more than he has any right to. It’s as if he had gone out in search of bounties himself, or worked this whole talk through in his head, or watched them from the beginning -- that’s right, he had been perched on that hill, lying in the hide of a grassy knoll like he might catch someone unawares. But that couldn’t be it. He couldn’t be hoping for this, he couldn’t be waiting for this like it was some star-crossed meeting, he couldn’t be as much a fool as Arthur.

He couldn’t have planned for this, surely.

Arthur glares, and hopes the boy will bare his soul. But he only waits at the base of the hill, smile welcome as anything, answering nothing, and with a question of his own.

“How ‘bout I tag along?” he says, sickly saccharine. “I’ll show you.”

John Marston, a man wanted for all crimes under Heaven, and offering to bring in bounties with the righthand man of the Van der Linde gang.

The cat’s game comes back, pawing at his good will. If he says no, Lenny will catch on -- sharp boy that he is, like a blade of grass -- and if he says yes, if Arthur says yes to John Marston walking by his side like they’re old friends into unknown ground, he’s not sure what will happen. He was bound, last time they spoke. He fears what he’ll say with nothing holding him back.

Like most struggles, it doesn’t matter in the end. Seems the punchline that is his fate was told the night they met, and told again today as the sun looms too bright.

“Mr Milton can come along,” Lenny says, warmly. Then, excited, “Right, Arthur?”

Marston smiles. He must learn something new about Arthur then, something like the soft spot in his heart.

Because Arthur can’t say no to Leonard Summers, beaming like the stars aligned.

. . . . .

Hillsbury is too far for walking distance. Arthur calls for Sol, Lenny hollers, and Marston -- of course he does, of course he would -- already has his horse ready, waiting on the far side of the hill, the side they hadn't seen from the ground. Arthur should hear the warning of it, age-old words from Dutch even, but the black sheen of Sol comforts him from the thought.

Lenny hops onto his roan horse with a spring in his step, still thrilled to be part of this posse.

And Marston -- his horse is a wild, broad thing. It is chocolate with a pale mane like a silver dapple, black silver -- it might be a Morgan horse too, though the thought alone has Arthur too soon in laughter.

“Got a problem with Old Boy, friend?” Marston asks, barbed in a way too cute for Arthur to take seriously.

He only laughs harder. “Old Boy?”

“Hey, it's a name that ages well!" Marston simmers a little, and then looks over at the Arabian. “What's yours called? Pretty thing.”

“Sol,” Arthur says, stroking her mane.

She breathes angrily, steps away from the strange, dark horse next to her, something like a warhorse -- might be a Rocky Mountain horse, if Arthur thinks on it. A silver dapple like that is wild and rare around these parts, and quite a beautiful thing, coat pearled in the sun. But Sol is not used to strangers -- they might have more alike than he first thought.

Marston takes her anger personally, the damn kid. “That right? Seems she ain’t got the most... sunny disposition.”

“No she don’t,” Arthur says. He holds her head a little, softly. “That’s why it suits her.”

Marston chuckles. “Yeah, sounds ‘bout right. Morgan, ever the contrarian.”

“Take it from me, then: be one or the other, don’t try to be both.”

“Vague. That apply to all things?”

“Sure does.”

“Then what are you, exactly?”

Arthur forgets he should be trading the boy for cash, and smiles despite himself. “A fool and a bounty hunter.”

Lenny pipes up. “So which are you _trying_ to be, exactly?”

They're all laughing as they ride on. The question lingers though, like all questions Arthur can't quite answer.

. . . . .

Two bounty hunters and a hundred-dollar-man ride into Hillsbury. The joke of it starts and ends there.

When they ask in the general store about T. Murphy, their accountant turned thief, the man at the counter knows very little. They buy gun oil instead, their guns powdery with grey and dust.

Marston is paying, a small price for his lies. But the storeowner doesn’t take his money, not immediately.

“Do I know you from somewhere?” he says.

Lenny stands not two feet away, oblivious, looking at honey-scented soap bars made from lamb fat. Marston looks like he might say something of a threat.

Arthur takes over. “Well, we _are_ friends with a young sheriff in Fallswood. That ring a bell?”

Least to say there are no more questions about the history of Jim Milton.

Through the walking and searching in town, Arthur forgets his misgivings. It’s clean work, and the boy makes for a good partner, spritely step the folly to his Devil-bad -- the asking around is quick and painless for them, and sometimes life-affirmingly painful for the asked.

Marston is helpful, even. He lays out the land for them, draws -- scratches really, these unfortunate figures in the dirt, but a guide all the same -- the contours of Hillsbury, where the hills might hide sunkissed heights, and where it falls into straight ground with stray buildings. “In case o’ trouble,” he had said, and he marked a foxhole cave with a cross. “No one will go there, believe you me.”

Going around Hillsbury, there are no hidden friends of Marston’s. No one in town seems any knowing to the man he is behind that youthful charm, and he takes to the loneliness with that young ease he does anything. For a moment, Arthur thinks the man must really be on his own, out here. The thought anchors him for too long, sorrow-laden.

But Marston takes well to Lenny. Falls into the act of a friend so well -- he shows him how to hold a rifle straight, tells him the trick of breathing -- breathing was everything, in the end. The decider of life and death and whether you could be ready to make the decision yourself.

Then he sends Lenny out to the far end of town with, “Try askin’ ‘em like I taught ya.”

And Arthur remembers this is no Jim Milton.

“Y’know,” he says, just as Lenny ducks into a building, “I already know where our wanted man is.”

Arthur balks at John Marston: a no-good having lied through his teeth for all of six hours and looking through a cigarette pack without a care. “So Lenny’s _wastin’_ his time?”

“Naw, he’s gotta learn the ropes, don’t he? Learn not to trust a stranger.” Marston goes for a cigarette, lights it shamelessly -- he pulls out a card he glances at, then scatters it. Arthur sees a panther on it when it falls, and thinks maybe it’s telling, a predator in the vice of tobacco. “But our mark’s in a ranch. East o’ here.”

Our mark, he says. Arthur goes heavy-headed at that, nearly falls then and there to where Hades waits for him.

“Why the hell didn’t you say so?” he finds.

There it is again -- Marston in firelight, with the match struck, and a quick flame in his eyes. He is stretching his arms out with ease and arrogance, and a cat-like grace. All while looking like he might groom himself, he sticks his tongue out coy and runs his cigarette along it. Arthur follows the pink with his eyes.

Marston may very well know the sickness he’s brought, smiling wide.

“I jus’ like to watch you struggle.”

Sickly sweet, and Arthur must be sick too, temptation singing he do something he’ll regret.

“I swear to God, Marston,” he breathes, but he’s long stopped thinking about God, and only wonders if there’ll be company in Hell.

. . . . .

“I thought you was showin’ him the _ropes,_ Arthur.”

Arthur hits the boy with his cut of rope, still lifted in the air. “I didn’t think he’d be this bad at it!”

Lenny is hopeless with the catching. Even after putting on Arthur’s hat he looks like he might’ve written or read about cowboys and anything else besides being one. The lasso in his hold is closer to skipping rope than a noose, falling about in the grass without ever wrapping around anything.

They bicker. T. Murphy writhes in the desert pastures, chained to a fence and sitting up, fine target practice.

“Try again, Lenny!”

It takes Lenny most of an hour to finally get the rope to close in on their bounty.

Something at least, even if he hadn’t been the one to catch the man. Curiously, T. Murphy had been well tied-up in the barn Marston spoke of. Arthur had walked in with Marston while Lenny waited outside, and found the accountant planted there, even. A token picking, or a _gift._ Neither of them had thought to mention it, then. It was proof of the game, wasn't it? Marston had been playing him since the afternoon, maybe since they met, and he just hadn't known until a gift was recklessly wrapped up for him.

Arthur feels a bit warm at that. A banking man cloth-gagged and left for dead in a barn he doesn’t own and so very suspicious -- and Arthur feels like he’s been given a wreath of dahlias.

“Thanks, Marston,” he says, looking over to the man.

Marston is watching with a tired mischief as Lenny shouts and celebrates. There’s a cigar in his mouth -- it smells of spice, like cinnamon.

He turns back, smoke falling around him, but no better hiding the quirk of his lips. “That’s _Milton_ to you, you Goddamned waste of a man.”

Lenny might even hear the exchange from where he pushes about the accountant, playful and proud as if it was all his doing. Arthur can’t remember to care, even lets himself laugh -- he blames the July heat of the night and not his own, blooming under his skin.

He can’t remember that he should worry when Marston lifts the pricey thing from his lips, oak brown and gold-stamped. “You’re free to try.”

Arthur can only stare, the cigar still coiling trails around them with a woody burning in the wind. If he were shameless he would take it -- has to remember that it’s where the boy’s lips had just been to stop himself, but even that-- that only works for so long before it betrays him. Then the thought is under his skin, in his blood, in his head, and he can only stop himself when Lenny’s laughter rings over.

“You stole that, didn’t you?” he says eventually, barely loud enough over the wailing cries of a man Marston had kidnapped moments ago, with him witness.

Marston laughs. “C’mon, he’s an _accountant._ ”

The criminality is not in his charges at all -- the criminal thing is that laugh, the laugh that makes Arthur think he could rob half of civilisation without thinking twice, could leave his morals by the roadside.

T. Murphy screams over his musings, and Arthur takes the cigar.

He watches Lenny smack the man silly. John Marston is a worse influence than the strongest spirits. But maybe Arthur lost his morals long ago, the day he was born to a thieving, loveless man, or the day he stole that watch, like father, like son.

After the sinister joy of it dies down, he heads for the local law building of Hillsbury. He is dragging T. Murphy along, leaving a crazed criminal alone with his underling -- and a path of spiced smoke, as he walks.

. . . . .

When he’s paid in far too many notes for his trouble, he returns to the barn, the farmhouse. The cigar is falling apart -- he stubs it into the ground with his heel and a weary hope that it might have lasted longer.

He only spots the horses at first, hitched to a fence. There are two horses friendly to him, and that Rocky Mountain he saw earlier with the moonlit white mane.

“Where’s Lenny?” he asks, more for himself than anyone. Wants to dust his hat, but finds that Lenny never had returned it. He almost walks back to the town to search for that alone.

“Ah, he was tired,” Marston explains, sleepy and peeking out from beside that black silver horse, brush in hand. “Said he’d turn in for the night, at the inn.”

Marston had waited for him, then. It's a surprise to still see him, out here in the night.

He might even find a teasing witticism for it, but he goes quiet as Marston tugs at rope by the fence. “You’re leavin’ now?”

The boy strokes the flaxen mane of his horse. He’s freed it from the post.

“You had no trouble leavin’ last time,” he outs.

That he says it with a peppered anger -- it nearly makes Arthur say sorry, but he's always had trouble with it. “Forgive me if I don’t much hang ‘round lawbreakers,” he says instead.

Marston steps up to the stirrups, coy confusion on his face. “An’ here I thought that was your job.”

Arthur coughs a laugh. An ease settles where he thinks they might talk awhile, a familiar ease, but his worries are back as the boy goes for the reins.

“Wait, you did all the work,” he says, flat. “Aren’t you takin’ a cut?”

He meets a wicked grin.

“Why, you payin’ for my time?”

Arthur doesn’t think that to be sickening. He must be caught sick then, watching too close as Marston frees his collar and curls the sleeves of a gunmetal shirt. “It’s only fair.”

“I was just here for your good company, Morgan.”

So helplessly bold, saying it like he could trust the stars and the plains with dangerous thoughts like that. Arthur wishes he could do the same.

Wishes, and then reasons he’s already bound to Hell. “You could stay awhile,” he says.

There’s this white pale in his skin as a silence comes, cold as the nightly change. Though he doesn’t have to worry long -- Marston laughs, only kept up by steadying himself against his horse with the lean strength of his forearms, bronzed and chiseled, and it’s damning enough.

“Another time.” His horse brays, stepping out of reach. He speaks with all the makings of a promise and not a farewell: “I’ll see you ‘round, Arthur.”

The horse runs, tail trailing as it heads for the moon. Marston riding all the while, a shadow over silver grasses, and then stopping at the turn of the hill like he might not leave after all.

And then he’s gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops, turns out I had a lot of fun writing this and I lied. Here's a real Christmas present for y'all! I love Lenny.
> 
> * Note: I've made a few edits now and then because there are 'smart' quotation marks and 'your regular boy' quotation marks, and I'm fussy as a kid. I want them the same, darn it.


	4. Gerbera red.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Don’t you be too bad, now.”

Arthur loses time standing there, watching the fields like something might greet him. He waits and nothing comes but a wind, quiet and dry.

. . . . .

He finds the inn once he can think to walk again. It is no easy job as it is a cornerstore half as long as the one in Fallswood, and it is no easy job as his mind is somewhere else, somewhere it don’t belong.

The inn is yellow-lit with only the glow of two lamps spanning the lobby, housing no more than three guests, if he were to guess. The dark hides the scuffs in wooden tables and chairs, but for the most part it seems tidy and smells freshly cleaned, something sobering like a pine.

One lamp hangs above where a woman is scrubbing at the counter. She looks to be using a horse brush, coarse and heavy. There is likely a different name for it, but Arthur can’t place it -- can’t help himself when that is all that comes to him, still in his thoughts with the moon and the mane.

She looks up, sighs before she smiles. “It is awfully late to be finding an inn, you should know.”

The lamps shine her hair elegantly, her hair deep brown with a well-kept braid along the top. Her dress is a daisy yellow, high-collared, and her skin is warmly dark. She seems so brightly sunny under the lights that Arthur forgets it is night out.

He checks his watch -- ten after midnight.

“Sorry, miss.” He tries to tip his hat, meets air, and fixes his hair instead -- it is getting longer than is comfortable for the heat, just past his ears. “I was here with a friend, and I heard he came to stay.”

The lady tilts her head, eyes a careful unkind. “Is your friend an old gangster with grey, greasy hair?”

Arthur laughs, a bit uneasy from the sudden stern in her voice. “No, ma’am. He’s uh-- Lenny’s just about anything but.”

Her face softens, smile swelling again. “Oh, that young man is a friend of yours?”

“Sure is.” He smiles a bit at Lenny’s easy greetings to even passersby. “Good kid, that one.”

“He’s very well-mannered.” She pauses, looks him over thoroughly, likely catches the dirt still in his sleeves from wrangling their bounty, and raises her eyebrows at his belt -- a gunbelt. “I’m not sure if I can say the same for you, though. I know people like you.”

That could mean many things for Arthur, but none of them good. He worries about the people she might have met out here in the open north. If they’re anything like him then maybe it is best for her to be wary. It’s been a while since someone last seemed to accept him for what he does. Not many people look twice at a lawful murderer -- not unless they’ve killed.

“I hope they don’t cause you any trouble, then,” he says, quietly.

She looks him over once more anyway, as if she’ll find something pleasant this time. “They do, but there’s no helping them.”

Arthur supposes that’s true for all of them. Dutch and Hosea had helped him, helped raise him, but he has to wonder whether they’re beyond help themselves. Although with the things Arthur has been thinking, he might not be far behind.

The lady smiles again, coming to some tender conclusion about him that he can only wonder. “Well, there might be hope for you yet, Mr...?”

“Morgan.” He remembers again that he can’t lie, not to a smile like that. “Arthur Morgan.”

“Arthur, then. I’m Tilly Jackson.”

“Well, you look like a hard-worker, Miss Jackson.”

“Oh, you. Tilly is just fine,” she says, unnervingly at ease in the face of an armed man, a hunting man. Must have been right to say she knows men like him. She throws down the brush into a milking bucket, hands scraped by the washing, and she wipes her brow -- could be ready to call it in for the night herself as she reaches for two keys on a hook behind her.

She puts one on the counter. Arthur takes it -- warm from her grasp, from the warm weather.

“Thank you, Miss Tilly.”

Tilly giggles, sweetly, and shoves at his arm. “You gunslinging folk and your manners. I will never understand.”

An earnest, kindly woman wouldn’t understand that it’s not about the manners, of course. With names it’s about the distance, it’s about keeping people safe from others who might ask questions if they think you’re too close. That is why given names are so dangerous out here, marking you guilty of liking someone more than is safe for you.

He thinks about Marston. Wonders if anyone calls him by name.

“Your room is down the back on the left, Arthur,” Tilly says, cutting him short of misery. She points the way down a dark hall where there are photos, family portraits -- a suited, gloved man, and a knee-high girl. “And your friend is in the centre room. Don’t go to that one on the right, ‘less you plan on killing that clown in his sleep.”

Arthur cocks an eyebrow. There’s a rough in her words, an edge of old loathing. “Would you like me to?” he asks, half-serious.

She hums. “That ain’t up to me, I’m afraid.”

For a gentlewoman to seethe like that, it begs the question: “Who is he?”

“I have a policy on that, sir.” Tilly taps her feet in thought, and they make a soft sound, like flats. “But I hear he’s a big man. Runs a hunter gang.”

Greyed hair, grease, and a gangster up near Niles. Arthur lets the question go -- he has an answer, and he doesn’t much like thinking it. To be sleeping so close to someone who’d sooner wish him dead is no easy thought. A man who nearly killed him not weeks ago.

Tilly watches, the lamp harshness in her face, her hair. “You know him, don’t you?”

It’s like every stranger he meets can read him without a thought. Maybe Marston was right that day, maybe Arthur is honest. But if Marston was right then Arthur would be a good man. Good people don’t think the way he does: a thin waist, lithe muscle, rogue laughter--

He must be tired, because his mind is failing him.

“I know he don’t like me much,” Arthur says, and he hopes it’s enough to dull her rising fears.

She sighs.

“Well, I only hope you’re not a bad influence on poor Lenny.”

Arthur thinks of every commandment he’s broken, and with how he’s forgotten them too well to list, it might be too late for that. “I hope so too,” he says, beyond hope by now, but he says it as thanks for her kindness.

He walks down to the end rooms, and he thinks of the truths he’s been keeping all night. How would Lenny take it if he knew he had been learning from a wanted man, or that Arthur has since wanted the man for more than the greenbacks he’s worth?

Tilly calls out after him, “Sleep well, Arthur!”

Arthur waves his own goodnight, but he doubts much sleep will come to him.

. . . . .

For a passing peace, it is kinder than most. He stares blank at the inn ceiling, resting on a foreign bed in his dayclothes. There’s not much use in changing when he could be called upon at any hour for work -- an old habit Dutch drew into him. The sheets are soft cloth, the room has striped walls of cream and butter colours, and it is all so thoughtfully clean for a place abandoned in the desert.

A candle kindles on the endtable. He puts his pocket watch close to it with the key to the room. He left the door unlocked -- not sure if he’s hoping their untold gangster cuts him down, or if he’s hoping for another kind of late night visit. It’s pathetic, how the room seems too quiet with only him, how the bed seems too big for a lone man.

His mother might have choice words about it all, and among them, “No peace for the wicked.” Arthur agrees, doubts he deserves sleep at all, but Fallswood, Dutch, and his own suffering -- all that can wait until morning.

The pocket watch ticks beside him, and the gold with a glass face is touched by candlelight. It rings with every hour he’s been lying awake. The third passes before he finds rest.

And he dreams tonight, the first time in years. He sees wheat fields and tombstone men, their hearts still beating.

. . . . .

There’s a whistling in his dreams, the washed-out sound of it like a memory. It ends with a knock on the door.

Arthur grumbles something cruel into his pillow.

“Good morning,” he hears, muffled by the cotton over his ears.

The door pulls inward to spite him, and Arthur faces it. A slice of dawn falls in with Leonard Summers gently holding out a mug of dappled steel, and a black well-loved hat.

Arthur works his expression back into something close to warm. He checks his pocket watch on the table -- moving on six. “Lenny? You’re up early.”

“That’s only because I know you don’t sleep much,” Lenny says, smiling until the door closes back, knocking his hold against the doorknob and spilling coffee over the floorboards. He swears under his breath.

Arthur laughs, only a little mocking. “Too used to holdin’ books, kid?”

“Books don’t go moving about when you don’t want them to.” Lenny keeps his grip on the handle careful now, careful not to spill it, and careful when he asks, “Did you sleep alright, Arthur?”

It’s an unusual restraint to his voice, so Arthur shrugs. “Didn’t wake up hungover.”

“I guess not.” Lenny passes the mug gingerly, the drink a tan brown.

Arthur drinks, and it soothes his sleep-scratched throat. The coffee is sweeter than he’s used to, and lukewarm with milk. It makes him smile all the same, waking with the crisp taste.

“How was Mr Milton?”

Then Arthur chokes, smile gone as he coughs on the rough of ground coffee and his croaking, “Sorry, what was that?”

“Jim Milton.” Lenny regards him with a sharp look, discerning. “Your _friend?_ ”

The quick of his words is worrying, or Arthur is still too bogged down with sleep to catch up. “I know, I mean-- what’re you asking for?”

Perhaps he hadn’t been careful enough -- Lenny watches him take another sip, a smaller sip, and stretches out words with intention. “Well, I didn’t get to thank him. It’s a shame.”

“That right?” Arthur looks at his reflection in the coffee, and doesn’t risk looking up. In the cup, he can see his own bedswept hair, his thin stubble growing. He looks every bit the ruined man he feels to be. Is that what Marston sees?

“Did he get home safely?” Lenny asks, startling him.

Arthur thinks the boy is the kind to only be at home in the wilderness. He can't say that, though. “I offered him a cut of the bounty, and he jus’ left. Anyone’s guess where he went.”

It’s not a lie, at least. Lenny nods, seemingly satisfied too.

“Wait.”

Arthur swallows a bitter blend, waits for the worst.

“He didn’t take his cut?”

And remembers to breathe again. “ _That’s_ what bothers you?”

“Of course. He worked hard.” He ignores how Arthur snorts at that, spitefully amused. “Why? What bothers _you?_ ”

That is more the question he had been expecting, the question he can’t answer truthfully. He wants to say everything bothers him, everything from the boy’s lies to his truths to his sinful smile which makes Arthur forget to care which is which, makes him forget to be the better man.

“Nothing,” he says.

Lenny smiles, hinting at a knowing kind of danger -- maybe he learned that, too, from Marston himself, or maybe Arthur just can’t lie to save his heart.

“That right?” Lenny says, stealing his words from under him.

And Arthur is certain he learned that from their wanted man.

He snatches back his hat, drinking down his coffee in answer. Lenny laughs, innocent to his suffering, his wrongs, and the sin of his dreams he can’t remember.

. . . . .

They have a meal before they leave. Tilly cooks them a simple stew of rabbit meat and summer vegetables, red with peppers and tomatoes. Arthur hadn’t realised he was hungry until eating. He can remember being wounded and beaten, but he can’t quite remember the last time he had a proper meal. Pearson would cook back at the saloon, but Arthur’s been so overworked he’s only stopped by to forget his troubles.

Soon their plates are bare, and the table wiped and empty save for a few notes on the side. It’s good to be able to pay the innkeeper for her welcoming. Arthur can even say his thank-you, and he means it.

“Come again, will you?” she says to Lenny, taking their keys. And for Arthur, “Don’t you be too bad, now.”

Arthur tips his hat. “I’ve been trying, Miss Tilly.”

Oh, and if only she knew.

Soon they are back at the farmhouse, the two of their horses hitched by the fence. It is the same outreach of grasses as last night, only silent now without their wandering rider. They mount up just as soon as they had come, and head for the early morning light towards the south.

Arthur can’t be sure what he’s looking for, but he spares one last glance over the hills golden with new sun and old grass and that lonely, hushed horizon.

And then they’re gone.

. . . . .

Nights go as they take on passing work in Niles. August comes, and there is no sign of Marston, not even a poster to remind them of the criminal he is -- to tell Lenny of the crimes to his name. Petty blessings, that.

Around them, shrubs and sunflowers grow weary with the weeks, but not the bounties. A concern for many lawmen -- having that many ‘troubled’ citizens -- but for them it means good pay and good rest. Lenny is eager to learn well into many days, and Arthur lets him, only saying ‘no’ to Murfree jobs. The pay for those is never enough for the cost to your soundness of mind.

Arthur teaches and Lenny learns, quick in a way that is almost sad. His wits would be a gift in their hunting business, but then, they would be a gift in many more goodhearted professions.

The burn of the sun gets to be too much, and it hides away. When they return to Fallswood the grass is dying, and the valleys turning a muted red. Summer is about to depart.

Dutch is leaning against the gates when they ride in close. He greets them like he has greeted many a lost man: arms wide, open, forgiving, and Arthur hopes he will be forgiven for his wrongs like when he was younger.

“You’re looking smarter by the day, Lenny,” Dutch says. He is in his favoured black-red vest now that the sun has gone timid. “Arthur taught you well, I take it?”

Lenny gets off his horse, grinning, as proud of himself as Dutch is of him. “Arthur is a great teacher. Almost as good as Hosea.”

Sol makes a grunting noise. Arthur does the same, stepping off her back. “Look at that, Dutch. The boy’s learnin’ how to lie.”

Dutch slaps his shoulders, laughing loud. “No chance he learned that from _you._ ”

The horrific thing is that he is right once again.

He brushes lint off Lenny’s back, tips down Arthur’s hat -- looks like he missed them, maybe. Arthur laughs a little at that, feeling every part the fool he is and the child he used to be. It’s been too long since he had the comfort of a father in all but name, and too long since Dutch remembered how to be one. A wonder, what absence can do to the hearts of men.

“Where did you go?” Dutch asks.

Lenny is still eager to prove himself, answering quickly, “First Hillsbury, then back ‘round Niles awhile.”

“And how was it?”

“It went well.” Lenny nods, self-assured. 

Dutch nods too, before bringing the conversation back where he understands it best, home to those great American freedoms: “How much did you make?”

“After all that..." A dramatic clap of hands, a mock-drumbeat, then, “Upwards of three grand, good sir!”

Dutch smiles. Lenny just has that effect on people. “What kind of work?”

Lenny explains in witty detail, starting from the jobs still fresh in their minds. He speaks of killers and hedonists with theatrics and enthusiastic waving -- must have picked up his storytelling from Hosea. That old con has been teaching the playful side to life, and just as well because it’s the side that Arthur doesn't know.

Arthur, who is busying himself with brushing Sol for whenever he will have to ride out again, always work around for him. She is covered in wheat stalks and crushed grasses, and he has barely scrubbed any away when the words reach him.

“The catch was smooth for that one, and we had help so we didn’t have to look so far.”

The sudden glance is heavy -- Dutch is watching Arthur, stilled. “Help?”

Lenny answers before Arthur can save himself. “We ran into one of Arthur’s friends. Jim Milton.”

Pine needles fall around them.

The laughter then is winded and wounded. Dutch doesn’t look back to Lenny, only notes how Arthur tenses beside his horse, and how the air turns to a fog between them. “A friend of Arthur’s, was it?”

“Not quite,” Arthur tries, in answer to that worrying tone. But it’s lost to Lenny singing praises: “Yeah, he showed me how to get townsfolk talking. A real bounty hunter, that guy!”

Dutch doesn’t offer that a response. “You have any other friends I don’t know about, Arthur?”

All because of that job in July, all because Dutch was right from the start, and maybe that meant he was salvageable -- he could still be right, things could be alright, even after all this.

“I’m not a friendly man, Dutch.”

It’s not an answer, and that thought hangs like a wall between them, a wall of a thousand men sentenced to death by rope.

“You should introduce me to this Jim Milton someday,” Dutch says, only half as frightening as what he doesn’t say.

Lenny agrees wholeheartedly, happily, and leaves for a good beer to celebrate his month-long outing. He is skipping to the saloon, unknowing to the silence he’s leaving behind. Dutch holds his head in his hands, eyes a storm.

Javier would never have let this happen. Arthur could learn something from him, something like the doglike loyalty that never steps aside, not even for-- what was it that made him let Marston go that day?

He can’t think on that, else his honesty will be his undoing. So he lets Dutch know of something he has been keeping. It won’t lead to anything good, but throwing him a bone to pick is better than throwing his heart and its confessions.

“I think Colm O’Driscoll was at the inn we was stayin’ at.”

Dutch’s face goes strict, his voice cracking at the ends like a whip -- he forgives all other transgressions in a shaky breath. “In Hillsbury?”

Arthur only nods, head down.

A click of the tongue, and Dutch reaches for his pipe. He lights it with a flicker, red passing in his eyes. “So that means I was right.”

Arthur fears that -- Dutch being right could be worse than him being wrong. Marston is proof of that. “What’re you on about?”

“They’re trying to take the north.” He breathes out angry smoke. “With all the wanted men fleeing there like it’s a safe haven, they’re hoping to take all the work from us.”

An old preaching tone, saying it like it’s an injustice, an evil. Arthur has heard that tone before, the tone he uses when he sends men out to kill, and to their own deaths. Poor Davey, poor Mac.

“It’s not that much work, Dutch. The better bounties are due east near all that money and civilisation,” Arthur says, near-pleading, working himself to death in thinking of reasons worth reconsidering. “And up north enough it’s Murfree country. I say let ‘em have it.”

Dutch speaks over him, pointing his pipe insistently. “Arthur, I’ve got a job for you.”

And there’s no point in speaking anymore, is there?

It’s a job, and Arthur is a good workhorse.

“I need you to go to the slaughterhouse near Niles, halfway Mace’s Bend.”

Northwesterly, and Arthur was there not too long ago, stringed up and stringed apart. “Y’mean... the O’Driscoll camp?”

“I want you to clear it out.”

Words too close to what had led to Arthur being skinned.

“What?” He goes frantic. “Dutch, we’re not startin’ up with ‘em again. It’ll get us killed.”

They stand close, shoulder to shoulder, and yet Dutch van der Linde seems a faraway enigma, watching far horizons, when he says, “Just trust me, Arthur.”

Arthur is weaker to those words than anything else he’s known.

“I do, Dutch. You know that.” There’s a pause then that he doesn’t want to acknowledge. “But you’re sayin’ the O’Driscolls are--”

“A threat to our livelihood.”

Talking of livelihood -- all while he’s smoking a princely pipe, clad in Italian leather, and well-rested, his eyes lucid in spite of everything he says. Arthur asks him, “What, are we short of money?”

“We’re making do.”

Arthur looks up, can’t watch him speak. It’s cloudy above them, heavy white but not smelling of rain. “Then why do we need the work?”

But there could be rainfall sometime soon.

“Are you doubting me, Arthur?”

Arthur says his best apology: “No, no, never doubting. I don’t doubt you, Dutch. I’m jus’ asking.”

There’s a drop in the talking like Dutch is parsing that, questioning the truth in it. He speaks after a few more breaths into his pipe, the winds carrying the burn. “We could always use more work. The work will stop us from _surviving_ and help us on our way to start _living._ ”

Arthur sees the distinction less and less now, only sees them arguing for longer stretches in the night. “It’ll stop us _surviving_ by getting us _killed._ ”

“Don’t you want them to suffer, Arthur?” Dutch’s voice changes, a different chord, a low minor. “To pay for what they did to you?”

It's sly, Arthur knows it. He remembers welts in his skin and cut wounds and his blood meeting his bruises. Healed now, but scarred over. “Is that what this’s about?”

“Arthur, they were ready to butcher you.” Dutch’s voice cuts off short again, suddenly broken -- he’s not conscious of it but that’s the slyest trick of them all, because Arthur wants to say sorry all over. “Don’t you want to do the same?”

“Dutch, I ain’t-- they had good reason for it.” Black eyes grow, so he hastily adds, “Good ‘nough, anyhow. They thought I’d killed their men.”

Then the smoke reaches him and it singes his throat. Back to that tone, the one that says they are the righteous ones in all this: “And did you?”

“No, but... that don’t mean I should go prove ‘em right by doin’ it now.” Arthur looks to the grass at his feet, withering and darkening. He looks back to Dutch. “You’re the one with the-- the history.”

Sorrow -- it’s there, in the eyes, for a moment so short he might have imagined it, before the wrath is back. “I’m not asking you to kill Colm O’Driscoll, Arthur.”

Arthur thinks on that, a burdening thought that it’s only because Dutch would rather kill the man himself. Murdering, punishing -- it's a sophist’s game to play with what is already true. Hosea knows playing with words, but Arthur only knows work; he’s not a good man, he’s a good worker. Dutch had told him that once, many years ago. If Dutch said it, then it had to be right.

But who was it that had said he was a good man--

“So will you take out the camp, my boy?”

Dutch smiles, just enough to be proud like the day he taught him how to shoot eagles out of skies.

And Arthur knows what he will say before he does. “Okay,” he says, even when it is long past that.

Dutch watches him step to the stirrups once more. The pipe smoke hides away his face in cemented grey, but there could be the ghost of happiness underneath it. That’s the thought that keeps Arthur going, getting back on Sol, heading back out those gates. No peace for the wicked -- his mother was right, all along.

“You’ll be okay, Arthur,” Dutch says, still not ‘goodbye.’

If Dutch said it, then it had to be...

. . . . .

Right in front of him is the red slaughterhouse, staring him down. A silo beside it burning into charcoal from shot boxes lined with dynamite. Butchering and killing are much the same, but what’s different is the screaming coming from the fires. A man walks out of that red building, all wailful cries and smelling of fried flesh. His face melts away like a wax candle. Then he joins all the other wicker men in the dirt.

Arthur is far from where the gangmen are taking up arms. Their pistols are at odds, here -- but then, so is Arthur’s. He holds his revolver desperately, bleak uncertainties in his mind -- should he have brought his rifle, should he have never come at all? He stops and starts when a high-whining shot sounds off to his right, a shot ricocheting off stone. The firing forces him low, crouching behind pallets and cargo. Wood is chipping away, falling apart. It won’t be long before he’s bared to the gunfire.

He looks back to the slaughterhouse, and the yellow light of a lantern hanging there. A far-reaching place to aim his revolver. He fires at it, feels blessed to have hit it, and watches it turn grass into ash, the fires catching embers and the canvas clothes of the men standing around. They flail their arms, smouldering slow in twisted yellow flames.

Then they fall.

Arthur doesn’t care for the noise, but he’s used to it. The gunfire sounds like heavy hail attacking wrought iron. He fires back, numb to his own revolver’s sounds. But Dutch’s words are loud and thrumming in his ears, you’ll be okay, Arthur, you’re doing well, see, come on, you can do better, see that, didn’t I show you how to shoot like that?

He gets caught up in it, old rememberings of their days as the old guard, shooting beer bottles off logs like that was something to be proud of -- and then that’s just the lapse in his senses that hurts him.

A bullet -- in his hip.

Numb nothing, and then white-seeing, all-reaching pain. It’s bad, it’s sinking into his skin, sinking him. All that is worse is the resigned pain to the thought that men can be shot down much the same as animals, in the end. Can be killed easier than wolves, no coat of unshorn fur to take the lead first. Like that O’Driscoll fleeing on the path, the man Arthur shoots back.

He stumbles, holding at where a hole has ripped his neck. Blood on his hands, down his collar, sputtering and deeply dark, a rough fountain-gushing as he tries to say his last words.

Then he falls, too.

There is a lull in the gunfire, and there comes the soft sound of a wind blowing over stained grass, and corpses, and into the pain of the wound at Arthur’s side.

This passing peace won’t last what with another camp of theirs so close from here, but the dead rest all the same, and Arthur lets himself rest too. He breathes in and soothes his stance because he knows this lonely quiet. It is the sound of a battle won and lost, the sound of dead men watching a lone victor. His grip on his gun goes slack, and he hears in his head that lifeline -- you’ll be okay, Arthur -- because it was right after all, he’s shot but he’ll make it, he always does, and so he breathes in rust and blackened smoke--

Dirt crunches. Footsteps.

He aims at the sound and meets thin, marbled wood aimed back. It looks scarred like the man it belongs to.

Arthur is a good worker, and good workers never rest.

“You better talk fast, boy,” he snaps, trigger held tightly and weakly at once -- hesitating to ever pull. “Last I checked, no one was s’posed to be here. Nothin’ but O’Driscolls.”

But the world has a scathing sense of humour. It laughs at chance and happenstance, aged old and sick and cynical.

“You’re tellin’ me. I thought you said you weren’t one of ‘em.”

Arthur may have survived the shooting, but his luck will surely kill him.

He must be the one to have lost a bet with the Devil.

“Marston.”

The boy tips his hat -- his hands are clean.

“Morgan.”

He looks different, now. A hard-set gaze that Arthur can’t quite name, and a casual threat in his bearing. It is as if he has grown, or as if the dirtied smoke has dulled the kind in his eyes. Smoke, deadened grey and hiding him as a cigarette burns in his mouth. There’s something about it that looks like Dutch.

“Care to say why you’re here?”

Arthur shrugs at the slaughter around him, hands a dried red from where they’ve held his own wound. “Think it speaks for itself.”

The boy lets the wind speak, and he looks about the butcher’s grounds. There is a distance between them, and he steps nearer to close it.

“You were here t’kill ‘em too, huh?” he asks quietly, only a question to be polite. He is angling down his rifle to turn one of the men lying still in blood and gravel, and he pats a shirt, enough to make metal clinking sounds like that of a flask, a watch, a pendant -- he is looting the dead, a man he hadn’t even killed.

Arthur looks on, watching the dark of those eyes as they judge value and worth and where the most precious treasures might be -- this wanting, thoughtful expression. It has Arthur wishing it were for him.

Then the boy looks up. “You wan’ anything?”

He’s holding family heirlooms, brooches and amber, and being generous in the most criminally considerate of ways.

“Sure,” Arthur says, biting his lip with fresh pain, olding wounds. “Things I can’t have.”

Marston’s face shows young confusion. He stares deep, looking for something of an answer, or some way to give what he can’t, but he gives up on it and turns back to the dead. Arthur feels short of breath, blames the blood loss. That’s right, he’s wounded, he’s shot--

“Not many would kill like this, y’know.”

Said with that same knowing. “This?”

“No reason to it,” Marston says, sparing a glance to twenty dead men he can see in the dirt, unburied. “Gunned down for the sake o’ gunnin’ down. That right?”

That he can tell a thing like that just from looking at the remains and bloodshed is frightening. It’s like he knows Dutch’s intentions more than Arthur could, like he knows what Dutch is thinking -- knows that he isn’t.

Maybe he even knows Dutch, because his hands stop.

“There’s only one hunter gang that’d weed out O’Driscolls.”

Arthur knows by now that he can’t lie. He gestures at the downed men around them with a heedless movement of his hands, fingers still matted with red and bound together, red-handed guilt. “Then what does that tell you?”

Marston abandons the corpse and looks over like it’s the first they’ve met.

“Tells me you’re dangerous.”

John Marston, pilfering from the unmade graves of murdered men, and calling Arthur dangerous. It has Arthur laughing at himself, has him wincing at the shredded muscle of his hip, has him wondering if this is all a dream of a blood-starved mind, has him noting the easy way Marston regards the dead, has him looking down iron sights and meeting a familiar face in a new light -- the colourless light of an overcast day.

He shows his red palms, and the gun in his hold. “So what’re you gonna do, Marston?”

But Marston doesn’t have a sense for danger at all. Numb to it, maybe, with how it’s every part of his being.

His eyes go wildly wide.

“You’re hurt.”

Arthur stumbles, his side stinging and his heart burning like all those nights before. Marston, ignoring the gun gone weak in Arthur’s grip and watching the blood of his hip with something pure and fragile, something like worry.

“I’m okay,” Arthur says.

If Dutch said it, then...

Marston comes over like there’s no danger at all, pushes him to be seated by the cracked set of pallets, and speaks with a fraught ire: “Morgan, you’re a terrible fuckin’ liar. Jesus, you’re shot.”

They’re close now, warmed by their breathing: the proof that they had won and lived to tell of it. Arthur looks up to meet those eyes, sees Marston standing over him, putting together rags for bandages. The white sky is brightly in his gaze, in the skin of his neck and face still slick with sweat, in the steel end of his rifle still smoking with the threat of danger even when he puts it away -- he must have shot some dead, too. And yet with the whites in Arthur’s vision blooming, the man looks something like a saint, pushing desperately at the wounds, caring pressure, but to the backdrop of a boundlessly clouded white. John Marston looking like a saint, of all things -- the blood loss must be bringing delirium.

There’s a thick of blood painting a line under his eye. It’s a livelier red over the red-kissed skin of his face still flushed warm from running and breathing. The red is as bright as the cut at his lip, freshly wet like the warning red of the Fallswood saloon just painted, the warming red, the welcoming red that sends men to drink. Arthur moves close enough to touch it, and in a haze of thoughts he will regret, he does.

He smooths it over, and he feels it against his finger, petal-soft like it’s not the blood on a man that has been roughed by time and wounds and standing alone in ash-laid fields with dead men. It is beautiful in a haunting way no god will forgive him for. And Dutch -- what would Dutch say? What did he think of love, of Molly?

Every woman Arthur has ever loved is owed an apology. He would bring them all home to his mother, he would, but this fool boy, this John Marston he wouldn’t show to anyone. Laws and bible teachings be damned, it wasn’t about that, it was not some secret of his -- he only thinks John Marston should be all his, alone. It’s this consuming and dangerous thought, he knows.

Molly O’Shea -- had she felt that way for old Dutch, before she lost her mind? Arthur thinks he could understand it, to be pained, keening, and fearing his own want. This love would make anyone go mad, is proof he is long mad -- this love is madness, all its own. There it is -- it took him bleeding out over the ground to be honest to himself.

It is on that eve of fall months when Arthur finds himself falling for a John Marston.

John Marston, staring back. “Arthur-- what are you doing?”

Arthur feels the blood on the soft of his finger, and he can’t answer that question that has stayed with him for days, weeks on end -- stayed with him where Marston couldn’t.

“Sorry, you had-- never mind that.” He learns how to say ‘sorry’ after so long, and only when it won’t save him -- he can’t take this back, he can’t kill what drew him to the cut of bright red along the boy’s lips and cheek.

Marston is short of words for once. Takes him a while to say, “I didn’t mind, Arthur.”

Arthur has no choice but to ignore it, not for himself or his crying conscience, no, they are long lost, but for the boy’s sake, now. “You should.” He starts, then stops, then thinks of all things they should do and not do and stop doing before it ends them both. “You should let me bleed out ‘ere.”

Marston wets his lips, purses them, and looks like he thinks they should do something else, something he won’t regret -- something Arthur will.

But whatever he is thinking, he puts it aside to scoff, “Then consider this due karma.” He wraps a rag around Arthur’s middle, tugs tight. “For helpin’ me when you damn well know you shouldn’t’ve.”

Arthur knows it to be true when he watches the lips that shape the words, the breaths meeting him midway. It’s only more true when Marston stands and touches at his own shoulder, dripping that dangerous red, and he fingers the buttons of his vest, his shirt, to free warm wounded skin underneath. A clean shot where his shoulder meets the strength of his arm, deep burgundy and open, about a finger’s width of flesh torn away. The rest of him is bared and sunly wet, and there are scars along the chest, scars near where muscle hides his heart. Arthur has scars like that too, but no one has ever seen them -- has ever looked at them like he is, breathless and hopeful.

Old pains are opening up, so he passes a bottled tonic, and uncorks his own.

“Thanks,” Marston says, the soft of his throat moving as he speaks, moving as he drinks down cranberry-red syrup. Arthur almost forgets the both of them are sorry, wounded fools.

He clutches his own drink, but his won’t cure him of the illness that keeps his eyes on bay-brown skin and the dips of collarbone and a satisfied smile. He drinks, and the tonic hurts with his judgement, with his sides still bleeding. He suddenly feels heavy, worn-down, beginning to fall like the leaves around them, his rigid legs giving up with the lost blood.

“Don’t thank me,” he says, red where he is clutching his side, red on his hands, red grasses below him.

Marston shouts something, and doesn’t he know better, doesn’t he know that shouting like that makes it sound like he cares? He could make anyone fall for him like that, like he already has.

Arthur falls, the ground gone red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was hard to write! I officially have no clue what I am doing and I am sorry about that. This is bloody and sad and the next chapter should brighten up. Also, not being able to say 'autumn' is killing me, haha.
> 
> Thank you all for sticking with this mess, I love you guys and hope this was okay? Happy new year, everyone!


	5. A penny for the ferryman.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He tastes like mint and iron.

It sounds like he’s underwater, drowning in the hums of shuffling, rushing steps, the watery call of his name, over and over, Arthur, hey, you’ll be okay, just stay with me, Arthur, c’mon, you bastard--

There are boards above him.

He thinks it might be a coffin at first, wooden, dark, and deserved. But when his eyes settle he sees the log walls supporting it: a ceiling. The sound of water outside, the sound of rain against the roof. So it did rain, after all. The light has turned soft with it, and from where Arthur wakes, he can smell it in wind through the window. It’s familiar -- same as the night he came home with nothing to show for it.

What he has woken to is a dusty bed beneath him, and a weathered one-room cabin. Broken where rain leaks through the roof, kind, as it falls to the sheets. The sheets are blanched with dark red circles where they rest over Arthur’s waist, his legs.

It’s not his bed, and not his room in the saloon. He is far from home, if the trees outside are a guide -- great and regal, these redwoods towering through the now greyed sky. They’re trees you might find further west, nearer Mace’s Bend and the heartlands of desert country.

It’s not his blood, either -- not all of it.

He knows because there are blood-red lines leading up to the hands before him, hands clinging to the sheets by his legs. The sight is desperate and terrifying and touching, all at once.

Marston breathes beside him, softly. Resting by the bedside, head cradled in his arms -- he is sleeping, knelt before the bed. His head falls over onto the sheets, as though he may have fallen asleep waiting and watching over like Death himself. He almost looks at peace, or gentle, or vulnerable. All things no wanted poster of John Marston would ever say.

Between his hair meeting the white of the sheets and the shy touch of cloudlight from the window falling against his skin, Arthur finds himself with an imagination he never had just to torment him, finds that he must have lost too much blood -- he might just call a man beautiful.

It pains Arthur to wake someone sleeping like that. The breaths are small, and one stutters, one is uncertain like it might be waking. Then it evens again.

“Hey. You alright?”

The breathing might strain itself for a moment, might sound funneled as if struggling.

“Marston. Get up.”

No response, the quiet is worrying. But Arthur doesn’t yet have the heart to wake him. Mind clearer now, but the thoughts that came to him near-death are still there.

Thoughts of falling.

For now, Arthur pulls at his bandages, careful enough not to pull them loose but enough to see underneath. The bullet is gone, looks gouged out -- rough, angular work, must’ve been cut out with a knife. It’s melted shut, cauterised, and at least means the worst is over. Apart from the bandages, the skin of his torso is all bare. Marston must’ve seen his scars, seen them while he made a fresh one.

Marston, sleeping soundly on the sheets, and the simple sounds of his breathing, of rainfall -- it’s everything Arthur doesn’t know well. Guns are kinder than whatever this secret quiet is, this stillness in the room like he’s privy to what the world has been hiding from him.

There are cut trunks surrounding them, all rounded and scratched. The bed sits beside the window, and the room is mostly spare, the floor dusty with saw. But the log walls are covered with some mounted bucks, some bookshelf lined with irony: Penny Dreadful prints, and other books of heroes and good men. Beside that, there are framed pictures. A young boy, and a woman with dark hair, coal-black -- it might match a fiery temperament. Arthur can’t be sure, but if his mind and body hadn’t betrayed him, he could have fallen for a woman like that, a spitfire who could keep him in check. The child might have familiar eyes too, if Arthur thinks on it. He tries not to.

Tries, until he sees a photograph of John Marston with them -- catching trout, like a family man.

He never did think to ask if Marston was alone, did he?

Marston-- God, he can’t even call him that no more. Because the man isn’t alone, because he isn’t just Marston any longer, it’s John -- _John,_ because this lodging says he could be a man with a woman, a wife, a family, a home, all things Arthur can never give, can never have.

Arthur sits up, hip burning as he tries to shake the man awake. There is still blood on his vest -- a rusty colour to an otherwise tanned leather -- and he is wearing that gunmetal shirt from that bygone summer night, the shirt that can hide gunpowder in the creases, hide the man that he is. It is opened and half-on where bandages have wrapped his shoulder wound. Bloody, and painful to look at -- more than Arthur’s own.

His own wound -- the cut of muscle at his hip, bandages covering it, calming it. There are used bandages on the floorboards beside the bed too, more red than white. It’s a lot of blood. The bandages on Arthur’s skin must have been changed and replaced for them to be so clean. No doctor, but this boy must really care. Sometimes that matters more.

Now Arthur moves with urgency.

“Boy, get up.” He doesn’t see it as cruel, only sees the blood. “Jesus, can you jus’ listen for a Goddamn second, John?”

Has he heard that before? From someone else, from someone who cares -- because the boy stirs out of sleep, pulls himself together like someone might need him, and that thought has Arthur forgetting what he has said. Maybe someone else has spoken to him all angered, worried, and wondering why they care for such an uncaring man. Maybe someone else knows his name.

Because his eyes draw tight, and then open soft, slow, and fluttering.

“Oh.” His eyes are out of focus and he rubs at them in small, clumsy movements. Looks up, murmurs, “Arthur? Thank God.”

John Marston, flesh and blood gone missing, and waking up beside him like that weren’t a sin but a miracle. Arthur feels his heart under his skin, in the pulse of his thumb. “Yeah, it’s-- it’s me.”

And then the boy blinks sleep from his eyes, and that sharp look comes back where it was missed.

“You-- that’s the first time you’ve said that, y’know.”

Arthur fears himself. “What’d I say?”

Soft, said soft as anything: “My name.”

Only listening when it would hurt, of course, Marston-- _John,_ because he had a family, didn’t he? He had people who shared his name and were more deserving of his love all through the luck of their birth. Strangers to Arthur, and yet, he feels an envy for them he’s never known.

The green feeling is thick and sickening. “Only to you, maybe. I’ve been damning a John Marston to Hell for a while, now.”

John smiles at that, like they wouldn’t both be given free passage on the Styx.

“You been thinkin’ ‘bout me?” he asks, only listening out again for the parts that bring him this boyish joy, and only damn Arthur more. “Ain’t that touching.”

A smile so wide the scars pull.

“Now, can you say it again?”

Taking what he wants, taking everything because Arthur has trouble being anything less than giving. He smiles while the door to the cabin shows in the far corner of the room -- chained and locked like a cell made just for Arthur, a cell to lock him in with his mistakes. And Arthur can’t bring himself to say it again, afraid of some boundary that might just give way.

“Shut up, Marston,” he says.

But in his thoughts now, with the thought that the man has someone else, is John.

John, still smiling, nodding to himself with a certainty. “Well, that’s what I like about you.”

Arthur sees that growing smile, and it nearly makes him smile too, nearly makes his lungs grow tight with the thought that anyone might like anything about him. But God, who else has seen John smile like that? Do Arthur’s thoughts show in the pale of his face, in his eyes? Do they always?

It would answer why John hurries to say, “Jesus, Arthur. You feelin’ sick? I could get you a drink.”

Arthur does feel sick, but like many things with him it’s beyond help. He’ll drink himself stupid once he’s back at the saloon, and Pearson might pity him for once. “No, I’m fine.”

If he says it enough, it might even fool him. Dutch might have taught him that.

“If you say so.”

John doesn’t look half as fooled, but he lets it go.

Rain, wait, quiet. Arthur doesn’t know these things well at all.

“You did a good job, patchin’ us up,” he says, sudden. He has yet to say his thank-you, but the insults always did come easier to him: “Better job of it than what you did on that leg.”

The leg he can see from where he is lying back. One side of John’s trousers has rolled up, cloth bunched together. It shows where a scar is uneven and uncivilised, with that shimmering pale that all scars leave behind, young skin not yet taking on the warmth of blood. Would have been painful tearing a leg like that, but time heals all things, and Arthur -- well, he let the boy live long enough to see it. God knows why, now.

John’s smile is smug.

“Gunshots?” He makes an enthused waving between them. Arthur hears Dutch: ‘us dangerous folk.’ “You and me can handle those fine, can’t we?”

You and me, he says. Arthur’s heart catches, catches on that passing hope that they aren’t so different.

“Now, wolves -- they aren’t made to be handled.” John presses a bit at his shoulder, his wound, and winces but then smiles something content. Must be pleased with his mending. “Wild things, wolves. I’m startin’ to think man can’t fight nature.”

Wolves, these wild things that aren’t meant to be handled, weren’t born to be -- couldn’t be, shouldn’t be touched.

Arthur hears the warning in it.

“Only took you near-dyin’ to learn that,” he says, taunting despite it all because it always did come easier. “Most folk’d say that’s common sense.”

“Ah, but most of ‘em are common folk.” John leans over the bed, over his folded arms, still kneeling and looking past them with a cunning in his eyes. “But I ain’t _common._ Right, Arthur?”

A rare breed of dangerous. John seems to be inching across the sheets, grinning forward. His breaths are warm through the cloth, caressing Arthur’s legs like the touch of skin but not quite, not quite, and now Arthur is thinking about it. Whatever reason he has left knows he should be well enough to leave, to go home where people are waiting for any sign that he might be still in this world -- and yet, John holds him there with the depth of intent in his eyes.

Arthur feels his mouth running wetly warm. “Don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, but you do,” John says, cocksure. He is resting his hands on Arthur’s thighs now, pushing himself off the sheets, arching his back like a cat stretching. The wounds must have injured their reserve. “You do, ‘cause I don’t think you make it a habit t’let your bounties off easy.”

He’s shifting against the muscle of Arthur’s legs, leaning down from the right of the bed. Arthur feels his own breath in his neck, his veins tightening like rope.

John, drawing close. “No, you treat me like somethin’ _special._ ”

Those hands push down, just enough for Arthur to fall deeper into the bed and hear the springs crying. He can see the blood still there, over that cracked bottom lip, that jut of cheekbone -- gets that feeling again, the one that makes him want to reach for it.

John reaches for him instead, holding his jaw. “Ain’t I special t’you, Arthur?”

He doesn’t know what to say -- ‘please’ lost on his tongue, but he doesn't know what he'd be asking for. And his jaw is stilled so he won’t lean into that hold, so he won’t answer, but anything he says will damn him. John always does know, somehow.

They’ve both known from the start.

He ignores it. “A special kind of evil, sure.”

John laughs, holds him dearly like that was the best answer he could give. There’s this pause where his laugh is going quiet, where they’re watching to see who is more far-gone, who goes to Hell first.

A quiet, stopped by a hiss. John’s hand is pushing at Arthur’s hip, Arthur’s wounds. It’s a lively pain, a pain Arthur doesn’t mind, doesn’t shy from, but John seems taken aback by it all the same. Like he forgot what brought them here all along, like he thought it really was something else, something beyond them -- something like the pull of the stars and not men with lead.

Those eyes don’t quite make eye-contact, but there’s a beauty in that, in how they start waking to unkind realities. One moment is all heat, the heat in Arthur’s wound and those hands on skin and John’s gaze, but the cold wind passes through, curtains furling white, and it’s gone.

“You feelin’ okay?” John asks, withdrawing, making some distance. “Sorry, you’re-- you’re a wounded man.”

Arthur’s heart is flitting, moth-quick. John is still too close, but moving his hands back to the sheets. He smells of rust and liquorice and Arthur can nearly taste it.

“Sure. Just shot.” Arthur swallows a wincing pain, somewhere deep -- hopefully the bullet wound, and not something else breaking. “Ain’t news to me. I’ll be alright.”

John bites his lip, draws some blood. “It looked bad, Arthur.”

Probably doesn’t realise that he sounds like he cares, saying a thing like that. Arthur isn’t used to someone caring, not for a long time. He does what he can for comfort, sitting up enough to feel a siren sear in his skin -- he grins, or imitates it, then damns himself and wipes at the bloodied cut of the man’s mouth.

“So do you.”

John doesn’t look away, only laughs bright. “C’mon. You don’t think that.”

But what Arthur is thinking won’t end well for either of them. He clears his throat, but the words he wants to say stay there. He ignores them, too. “Wha’ time is it?”

John laughs, a brittle thing this time. “You tell me. I jus’ got up.”

“How long’ve I been out, then?”

A crack of bones and joints as the boy bends back, tilts his head, a cat in the sun. “Bit over a day? Not long. You’re a freak o’ nature.”

Arthur tries to laugh at that, only gets so far as a cynical curve to his mouth. “It’s just practice, kid.”

Living is a talent too, and can be cultivated like any other. But maybe John doesn’t see it that way, with how his eyes go tender.

“Sayin’ that like you’ve got a death wish.” He looks on with what could be sad, or an understanding. “You got someone who’ll miss you?”

Asking now when they have every mistake within reach, too late for it to matter.

“No.” They’re different, like that -- Arthur never found someone to settle with. They’re too different, and the same only in ways the world deemed wrong. “No one would have me.”

If John were right, if Arthur really were honest, then he would lean in and stop lying to himself. He doesn’t, though. They’re both still stinging from day-old wounds. Arthur wouldn’t dare open up another. No, he doesn’t -- he stays put, careful too late, holding his aches in place. A bloody ache, a heartache.

And it is John who is reckless and thoughtless and a taken man, Arthur should be thinking about that more where he won’t, but he can’t remember it in the moments between John smoothing his cheek and holding him still.

It’s John who speaks in a whisper.

Like Arthur’s made of straw.

“You sure?”

John who lets all that care go to waste as he pushes himself forward -- his hands on Arthur’s thighs under the thin restraint of the sheets, then at his hip. There are shrapnel wounds beneath the cloth that run alight but Arthur doesn’t mind. It doesn’t feel like pain with the breaths warmly meeting his own. He had been planning all his sorry apologies should he lose sight of the sin in it, should he finally fall victim to John Marston and the way he runs his tongue over his lips when the wind is too dry, the way he clings to the sheets when he sleeps, the way he acts like Arthur has always been a part of his morning wake.

But it’s not his fault when it happens -- John brushes his neck, and then seems to feel how close he is, tugging up off the bed, watching as Arthur sways like saplings in a breeze. There’s a distance between them, and then none at all.

He tastes like mint and iron.

John, looking like he might pull away or learn what it means to regret, but he only pushes Arthur further into the springs, holds him down with the weight of want and a grip at his jaw, his chin, his other hand -- empty, until it clasps his, tight. For two men who have never once fit in this world, their hands fit one another just fine.

It’s not civilised, their kiss -- but then, nothing about them is. And civilisation would call them fools for ever wanting it.

Arthur trembles, feels it in his hip with his wound, burning him. He hisses with it, sound turned to a gasp when it’s lost to John’s mouth on his, stealing his breath like he steals most anything: shameless and careless. Warmth, heat, and a thousand apologies to every person he has let down, Hosea, you were right, I’m a fool, a hopeless fool--

“John, wait-- you shouldn’t,” he says, as if it’s stopped either of them before.

He says it between each time he can force himself to stop, to breathe, to leave those lips. His words hardly mean a thing because his jaw goes slack, mouth hopelessly open and tasting that aniseed bittersweet of cures that won’t cure him of his want. But John keeps him there with a lawless hand at his neck, bruising, and halfway through choking him with the violence of it. Arthur forgets what to say, can’t speak with a tongue on his, and just as well because he would say anything to keep going.

When they pull away their breaths still touch, heated in the space between them. John, sitting atop his wounds now, pinning him still by straddling him, knees dipping the bed. Lips red with blood and bites and the bruises of tomorrow.

“Don’t say-- say you didn’t know this would happen,” John pants, voice all lost and reeds.

Arthur doesn’t say anything.

He just pulls John down by the collar to kiss him again, and their mouths burn like fever.

It’s still raining like God damning him, because between each kiss he asks for teeth against his neck, asks for marks that bruise. Arthur Morgan, wanting a wanted man.

And Dutch -- of course he would think about Dutch now, at a time like this -- he was always the kind of man you couldn’t help but think of at your highest and lowest, like God Himself. Arthur wishes he could say sorry for being like this.

What would he say?

“You can’t change who you are, Arthur. We can’t fight...”

Dutch, right all along in all ways that made men cry.

“We can’t fight our nature...”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is a little late! Original draft had a, uh, risqué bit at the end, but it got so long that I figured I’d leave it for next chapter. So um, goodbye while I learn how to smut? I am basically a child? As always, thank you guys for being here! I should go catch up on some sleep. My blood is 90% caffeine.


	6. Styx.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That’s the sin that will send him under.

The first man he’s ever wanted, ever held. For something Godforbidden, Arthur falls into it like he would with anyone else.

Easy, like it couldn’t be wrong.

They kiss, and he can taste it. Heady rust, stale sweet, and that taste underneath it all when they’ve kissed the rest away -- the bare wet of John and his mouth, his tongue, his spit that pools over and meets Arthur’s own. Someone pulls away, but they can still feel it -- red and raw on their lips.

Lips wide, gasping. Choked gasps as if they’d been drowning, but everything is too warmed for it, too burned. Pale burning, hot breathing -- it’s like they’re running on bourbon and not blood. Drunk with how badly they want to be touched.

Whispering drunk nothings they’ll regret come the morning.

“Anyone ever tell you you’re beautiful, Arthur?”

Must’ve kissed for too long because John’s voice is all husk, no restraint. He smiles gently, brings his fingers over the scars of Arthur’s chest. Caring, as if those scars could bleed again after all these years.

Arthur’s heart stops.

Scared to a stop -- he’s not used to being cared for. Hears his breath in his ears, loud enough that he almost misses that he’s been asked something.

Answers in a broken voice. “Liars, maybe.”

Broken as the skin of his bitten neck. He has to look hopeless, laid out on the sheets as he is. Bruised purple around his collarbones, pinned where John sits his weight in the wound like a knife coring the sides. Has to look hopeless enough that John takes pity on him -- kissing along the marked line of his throat, pawing at muscle, thumb holding his lip. Caring and careful against the skin.

Murmurs into it. “You’re one sorry bastard, aren’t you?”

Words tickling where they’re breathed, bright-eyed like he thinks Arthur is worth something.

But Arthur isn’t worth so much as the hundred dollars to John’s name. He can’t remember the last time anyone thought anything good of him. Mary who thought he would never be a better man, Dutch who thought he would never grow up, and-- no, she’s gone. She has no thoughts left for him, anymore. Good or bad as they may have been.

And John’s thoughts should be for someone else. “Damn it, Marston. Don’t you have a family?”

John peers at him curiously, and for once Arthur hopes he’s wrong. Hope never did him any favours, though. “You care ‘bout that?”

Arthur doesn’t know, but he knows that he should. He did care, once. About a family and their futures. He doesn’t answer, sidesteps: “The law don’t care for this, either.”

There’s a pause like John will ask him if he cares about that, too. Seems to think better of it, or to think he knows the answer without it said. Always does somehow, as if they’re more than near-strangers who’ve met a couple days, a couple nights -- as if he can see himself in Arthur, or growing into him someday.

That’s a bad place to go. “John... _Christ,_ you don’t-- you don’t want this.”

John laughs at that, and his body thrums through his boiling blood and bone. Shaken movements, enough to have Arthur stirring where they meet at their thighs. Where they meet when John grinds down, and they’re both groaning low. He eases his thumb past Arthur’s lips, sweeps the tongue over with wet warmth. Arthur swallows around it, swallows down his words and his reason, and just as well because he doesn’t know what he would say. Not when he likes how it feels with his tongue pressed down, held down like he is over the bed.

Licks around it, hears John’s breath hitch, wonders what exactly the law would say about ‘crimes against nature’ and--

Faraway, he wonders if Dutch would scold him or praise him for it. For acting against the world like this, writhing as John sits himself listless and answers with the press of their lengths through cloth.

Arthur doesn’t know, but he gasps past the thumb in his mouth.

He can feel how badly he’s wanted.

“Please.”

How much he’s wanted this.

“John.”

Pleading for him, or for him to stop -- Arthur can’t say. Every excuse waiting, and yet John takes a pleased breath and he forgets them. Forgets that he was once told he never could learn from his mistakes, forgets whether it was Dutch or Mary to have told him that -- forgets to think about anyone else while his lungs give out and his muscle aches under the bodied weight of John over him.

They told him right. Arthur never could learn from his mistakes.

Makes another, suckling on another finger and hearing John curse to the air. Never thought he’d ache for the sound someone makes when so desperate. Shouldn’t like it, shouldn’t be doing this at all, but he’s drooling over his lip and that knuckle and he can hear the wet in his mouth as it spreads wider -- can hear his own sounds, splintered and high-pitched and gone.

Can hear John moaning with it.

Startled by it, bucking back into him. They tense with the sudden relief, how their minds go dark for all of a moment, and it’s too much at once that they’re hissing. Too much that Arthur ruts into it, clinging to John's sleeves, hip split with pain. Stretching pain, on the cusp of snapping -- but all he can think of is the wet heat of his mouth, of the wet under his jeans, of the wet weeping through his bandages.

It’s John that has the sense to slow. For a boy like him to be the one holding back is wrong, but Arthur is well past embarrassment -- whimpers in his gut. John is holding Arthur into the dips of the bed, holding him back from that pinprick friction.

Hand slipping, catching the edge of his wound.

Everything burns.

A taking dizziness, eyes gone black. Blood filling his ears with the pain, and he doesn’t want out -- it’s just a sawn feeling in his flesh that he doesn’t know well enough to pull away from. Can’t hear anything, but his mouth falls open and he could be calling out.

Waning pain, as he comes back down. Won’t ever admit it, but he wishes it had stayed.

John can’t know that, though.

Looks shot with worry like the day before. “Fuck. You okay?”

Draws back his hand, licks along slicked fingers with his tongue. Arthur keeps his eyes there, too caught up to answer for a time -- it’s where his own tongue had been, fingers reaching down his throat. When he thinks to speak, his breath sounds stolen.

“I’m _fine,_ damn you.”

Not damning John, no, he’s damning himself -- for getting swept along by the wicked in John’s eyes, and John’s mouth, and John’s wrongs.

They’re joined by that guilty string of spit hanging from John’s hand to Arthur’s lips. Joined where Arthur is still arching into John and biting his lip cropped when his hips won’t reach. Feels close, hasn’t been this close to someone in a long while -- he feels like this isn’t enough.

“Oh, you’re _plenty_ fine, but--”

John breathes in his talk, sharp.

Arthur cants upward while his wound sings, hot and hurting but they’re panting with it and he can’t bring himself to stop when John makes this long noise from his chest.

Can’t, until Arthur is held down once more. Palms over his heart. “ _Arthur,_ damn it, you’re-- you’re undoing my work.”

Rests another hand on his waist, brushing to the ripped line of bandages -- brushing over them, with sleepy pain. The wound must be bleeding again.

Arthur cuts his lip with his teeth. Sounds he won’t admit to on his tongue.

John must hear it with how he starts.

It takes seeing the undying shame under him before he smiles, eyes drawn, like he’d hoped for this since the night they met. That’s a wrong thought, but it settles easy as ale. He fingers the padded muscle and Arthur follows it with his hips.

“Ahh, I see,” he says, proud-like. “Don’t mind the rough, huh?”

Knows it, the same way he knows anything -- well beyond reason.

Lips glinting victory, eyes upturned. “Don’t wanna hurt you too bad, but... if it’s just this...”

He skims his hand up, puts it over the heartbeat in Arthur’s neck and the warmed red there, the shadows of kisses bitten into the skin. Presses into it, presses down.

Arthur chokes to breathe, leans far and closer to it at once. Hot, cold. “John, h-hold on--”

John must’ve been right about Arthur, about everything from his honesty to his death wish -- because he likes how it hurts.

“Ain’t you precious,” John says, awed.

Somehow says it with meaning, and Arthur turns to hide his face, feverish up to his ears. “Don’t you dare laugh.”

John doesn’t, couldn’t, his breath taken from him like this is all breathtaking, like the sight of Arthur pinned and panting is as breathtaking as the sight of John -- lips and cheeks reddened, blushing with blood inside and over. He says nothing, fixed on the way Arthur goes after that bold bruising on his veins.

Arthur bites into his palm, bites down asking for too much. Strung tight with the rush it gives him to be this close to danger. That might’ve been what led him astray all this time. This dangerous tiptoeing around a dangerous man.

Feels hands at his chest, pinching pink until he heaves. “Don’t-- don’t do that.” John pulls forward, teasing hard through the tough of their slacks. “John, stop--”

“Lotta orders, Morgan.” John keeps that ease about him, reaching between them. He’s tugging at his trousers, lifting himself just enough to pull them from his legs. Easy, so easy -- he makes it look easy like he’s been here a hundred times, held a hundred men before. “But I get it, I can work with that.”

Tugs at Arthur’s denims, tugs them down to his knees.

And it could be the sudden cold through the window, or the cold sweat of themselves laid bare, the cold thought that John could’ve stringed along so many other hopeless men -- because Arthur sobers to this.

Scared, really, once the reality of what they could do sets in.

“Wait, I haven’t...”

John slows again, eyes soft but they hurt all the more for it. “Arthur?”

They’re both breathing too loud, wanting too much. It could hurt with their wounds still clipped in their flesh, it could drive any man mad.

“You’re the-- the first I’ve...” Arthur’s always been too honest, and he knows he’s talking senseless. “Look, I’m not... familiar, with this.”

John leans back, stopping, looking to the door with a passing interest -- as if he’ll make to leave.

But he only holds Arthur’s wrist. Holds it still, fingers over that jackrabbit pulse, and Arthur can feel how he’s unsteady like his cocky bravado was a front.

“Same here,” he says.

Quiet enough to be a secret for the two of them.

Watching with warm eyes that make Arthur fall all over, deeper into the sheets. He can’t meet them, lest he says anything more he’ll regret. This has to be it. What it feels like to be loved, to love someone else. Easy and hopelessly soft. Both scared and smiling through it anyway.

Arthur’s never been quick with words. Was always better at the showing, the sketching and imagining. He doesn’t trust himself enough with what’s in his throat. Words he shouldn’t mean. Words like ‘love.’

So he clutches that slicked length of hair, tugs a startled John closer to him -- “Hey, wait a damn second, Morgan!” -- sends John falling until he has to brace along the width of Arthur’s chest.

And Arthur kisses him, softly, kinder than he should.

Doesn’t he know that he looks like he cares, doing a thing like that?

Holding John by his arms -- feels how he’s shaking. Could be excitement, could be adrenaline, could be nerves. Boy-like nervousness that’s too grounding, too human. Real, in a way Arthur shouldn’t want.

Between holding John over him and humming into the tender of his mouth, Arthur lets him go, finds words somewhere: “You talk too much.”

John knows it to be the assurance it is. Scoffing smug, “You like it.”

As if they’ve known each other for years, as if there’s more between them than just their names and their guesses and whatever it is that warms their blood like this. Arthur must be a softhearted fool, too, because he doesn’t have the heart to turn John away then.

“Well, just...”

He should stop this.

“Don’t get carried away,” he says.

John sounds strained, holding back laughter. “Alright, alright.”

Or maybe something relieved and overcome, as he cradles Arthur’s jaw.

“Don’t worry.” That rogue certainty he’s always had. “I don’t wanna scare you off yet.”

Saying that like they’ll be making this mistake again.

Arthur doesn’t say anything to deny it. “Hurry up, then.”

Doesn’t think it matters, clinging to John’s shirt as he is. White grip that could tear through the linen, slipping it off with the vest hugging the sides. Finally met with the slicked entirety of John’s skin, his close-set muscle and the brush of hairs along his chest by his bandages. They’re naked, vulnerable, and maybe they shouldn’t trust each other with that -- or trust each other at all.

But they do.

Fools they are.

Skin meeting as they buck against each other, slicked lengths and their startled groans with it. John palming himself as he falls forward, and Arthur can’t do much else but watch in the desperate wanting of it. Locked in the sheets and sore where he’s gnawing at his lip -- still sounding through it, shaky and strung-apart. Muffles it by nipping along the jut of John’s collarbone, not enough to bleed but enough to hear that tight breath and have John pulling rough at his hair.

To have John and his fingers between them, pulling where they’re both exposed.

Hard out of their minds.

Cocks rubbed close, skin-on-skin that can be felt and heard wet in the room. Heard over their broken breaths. Quickened breathing, pace heating. Hand spit-glistened and catching where they’re leaking over, thumb drawing it out -- drawn-out moans between them. Moans that get caught in their mouths as John falls to kiss him again, open, tongued, kissing until he can’t.

Flailing back to breathe, but their lungs are lost and their thoughts are flayed and John is leaning flat against him to suck red at his throat as it burns, cold, like a flesh wound.

Toes curled, legs weak, blank-minded pleasure. John touches them, fingers the slits and Arthur hears himself, his abused voice: “God, John, stop. Please, I can’t--”

A stuttered breath.

“ _Please,_ you say.” John keeps his grip tight, his hold keen. “That’s it, that’s good. Good for me, aren’t you?”

Arthur chokes on a ripe whine at the back of his throat, lips chapped where his tongue wets them. “I’ve been-- been good to you since we met.”

Sees John bare over him, shining eyes, and shining skin graced by sweat. Grinning with his words. “Oh, don’t I know it.”

Arthur wants to sit up and kiss it all away. Though that feeling sets in, the twitching in his thighs, hot under his skin like a blade, sharp and stilling him.

John stills himself.

“Close?”

Says it with a cruelty more than the bite of his teeth or the cruel, cruel slowing of his hand where it fingers their cocks between them. There, this is Arthur’s lowest, where a boy like John can hold back more than he can.

“Must’ve been awhile.”

Arthur whispers, tight -- it’s balancing a sob. “ _John._ ”

A hand on his cheek, soothing away that embarrassing mess he knows he looks to be. He wonders if people will see it on him. Those marks of lips and hands that will linger in his mind long after they’ve left his skin. That will stay long after he’s left.

John speaks, easy. “Now, you strike me as a man who forgets himself.”

Draws himself back on his arms, back towards the bedend. He’s kept himself leaned over, and Arthur is expecting him to walk out. Should have expected it -- could never have a good thing and keep it.

But then there’s a pent-up breath over his cock, heated.

“Y’need someone to care for you, don’t you?”

Barely breathless.

John looks up from where his mouth is ghosting along the skin, words felt in every breath he takes. Lips so close Arthur could feel them on him if he dared to lift into it.

Doesn’t, his wound and whatever sense he has keeping him bound.

And he’s left to watch as John takes him into his mouth.

John watching back, eyes that are blackened by want and will follow him into every night he’s alone and the sky shows black.

He’s already got his eyes shut tight, feels tight all over.

Begging blankly when John pulls back.

“This alright, Arthur?”

Arthur feels his voiced agreements in his throat -- no words, only whimpers. He can’t do much more than nod. Gives in, gives up -- can’t do much more than let John suck around him and lay back and take it.

John eases down his length. Arthur breathes loud, belly heaving and the skin of his stomach stretched with it. His fingers pitch to hold something, steady himself. He grips the sheets and can’t help how he fucks into the rim of John’s lips. Hears John startle with it. Opens his eyes wide in a panic.

Wants to say sorry, but his voice is gone with him.

Doesn’t have to -- John settles back into it.

Eager past pain, and he draws his lips further down where Arthur can feel him mouthing up to his navel, far enough to hit the walls of his throat.

Arthur keens.

His skin is fire and his mind is white and he’s saying things he can’t ever take back, but his ears are ringing wildly. John wringing sounds out of him he’s never heard. Tight, tonguing, too hot, too close--

The look he meets is what sends him over. John with cheeks pink, wanting, waiting, for him to come undone. He’s calling out John’s name.

It’s the pulled wet sounds of John taking him as he comes. Spilling over John’s lips, and he wipes it over, easy.

Easy, like this couldn’t be wrong.

Arthur is calming himself. Hand over his mouth and caught up in the white of the bed. Deep breaths, deep breaths -- not sure why he’s got this survival kicking in, telling him to hightail it back to nowhere. Hasn’t felt like this since the first time he shot a man. Keyed-up and blood rising and his hands jolting with something dangerous, something wrong.

Comes down from it as the curtains dance on a wind. The winds of the outside -- outside where they would be damned for laying beside one another, outside where home is waiting on him. Cold winds where their breaths are warm, but it doesn’t bring him the regret he’d been holding out for. Only sets alongside the heat of his blood, ends in this cold-hot pulse.

They’ve stopped to breathe, lungs loose. Arthur should be thinking of the mistakes that led him here, but he only thinks of how he’s spent and sated.

And he thinks of John, like with every mistake he’s made since summer. “Did you-- what about you?”

Arthur can still feel him against his leg, hard, taut with it.

John smiles, waves him off. Pale wet dripping from his lips.

“It’s fine, Arthur.” He leans back into the stained soft of the sheets. “Di’n’t I say I don’t wanna scare you off?”

Arthur straightens his trousers, shy, suddenly, as he pulls them back over himself. It’s coldly soiled underneath, uneasy. But John looks content where he settles at the end of the bed. Thin hips, showing bone, and yet strong in surety. So at ease where he lays back, and Arthur is dazed by it. He never could feel so at home in his own skin.

Sure as anything.

“You don’t have to do a thing,” John says.

Then he’s grinning a little, hand inching closer over his thighs until it’s too dangerous to look, but Arthur can’t shy from what’s dangerous. Looks anyway, and John must know because he stops just short of sin, thumbing curls.

“Hope you don’t mind if I think ‘bout you, though.”

Arthur chokes. He has to stop himself from thinking of it.

Can’t, and that’s what he’ll be thinking of when the desert’s lonesome gets too much. John alone in the night, and taking himself in hand, and calling his name, and-- “ _Christ’s sake,_ John.”

Arthur feels the red warmth in his skin, in his neck. John has to know what he’s thinking then, laughing wide.

But then it’s not just the thought of it. John is leaning into the wall, legs splayed open, and it’s the sight of him reaching for himself, twitching into his fingers.

Breathing slowing.

His eyes have fallen shut, and he’s trembling with it, with that first threshold of being touched. He holds himself in hand, runs his grip along his length as his breath breaks. Arthur can see it, then, can’t look away from it -- from how much John wants him.

And as Arthur watches, as that hold goes tight around the head and that breathing picks up--

John is watching him, eyes lidded.

“ _Arthur._ ”

No guilt, no excuses.

Arthur isn’t thinking anymore.

Sits up, can’t help it when he drags himself closer and feels it pull at his wound like hate in his hip, can’t help that he doesn’t care for the pain. Desperate to put his hand over John and touch him with the wet on his fingers. He doesn’t have to, but God, he _wants_ to.

That’s the sin that will send him under, that’s why his wound is burning him alive -- all for wanting someone’s happiness more than his own.

He grasps, and John slips into it. Holding John against his chest, kissing cyanide salt off his tongue. The lingering of where he’s spent. Hears John’s surprised noises in his throat, that desperate noise when Arthur reaches for his cock, rubs over it, graceless.

John jerks back to breathe. “Wait, that’s-- that’s too much.”

Arthur keeps his grip roughed and quick and he’s chasing after John’s pleasure more than he should, more than he can deny.

“C’mon, John.” He’s speaking into John’s nape, words warm against the skin, mouthing at sweat. “Isn’t this what you were thinkin’ ‘bout?”

John tenses, whimpers. “Fuck, ah-- Arthur, you-- _God._ ”

Voice stripped down. Arthur runs a hand through John’s hair, and it’s all grease and sweat but neither one of them minds, and when he tugs just enough to pull John closer he gasps something pretty. Pretty, like the pink touch of his skin and the way he writhes.

It’s not fair at all, for a man to look like that.

But he keeps thrusting up into that hold, and lets out this wet breath. Head tilting into where his hair is pulled, unruly and dirty but he wears it with that boyish pride and wears it pretty.

Or it could be that they’re both so taken with one another that they’re blind to the faults.

John is gasping, torn.

Arthur kisses down the sounds. John’s neck must hurt turned back like this, but he’s shivering so close to him, heartbeats meeting. The sounds of him all swallowed by their mouths. Growing wet, growing close.

He’s on the peak of falling apart.

“Arthur, I’m--”

Loud, arching.

Arthur kisses him through it. Seen this before, if he thinks on it -- in a dream or a nightmare, he can’t say, but he’ll see it again if he can get any sleep after this.

John fucked out in his lap.

Still blissfully mindless. He doesn’t kiss back for a time.

When he does, it’s slow, steadfast. They’re tired and sore, pulling back as wind pulls in from outside. Cold with the rain but silent, now. It isn’t regret that comes down with the high, only the brother of it -- the knowing that Arthur shouldn’t have done this, and yet, the knowing that he would do it again.

A feeling sets in with the breeze, coldly unsure. But he’s never been good with feeling much.

Can’t name the feeling that has him pulling at John’s arm, pulling the man flush and kissing into his mouth easy, sweetly. He should be leaving, should have left this alone, but John makes a soft sound against his lips and Arthur nearly asks to stay awhile.

Tastes himself with his tongue -- bitter sweat. Nothing good, though bad men wouldn’t deserve any better. Wouldn’t need it either, not with how he’s going warm from just a kiss.

John leans over him once a quiet falls between them. A shared silence, so still it could shatter like stained glass. He cups the side of Arthur’s face, the crust of stubble. There should be something final in how they kiss, then. But it’s yearning and Arthur knows it like a promise.

It’s John that has to stop him, palm to his lips. A sure smile when he can breathe again. “You keep this up, Arthur, an’ we’ll be at it for days.”

Arthur’s face burns bright.

There’s a fleeting kiss to his cheek. More intimate and more damning than anything they’ve done -- he wipes at it with a hand, holds it warm, holds it there like it could stay.

John rubs at his neck once they part, sheepish somehow. Looking innocent, after doing so much wrong. Younger for it, all the blushing of a damn kid.

Arthur feels ever more a bad man.

There’s too much to say, now. He wants to say sorry to the fathers who raised him, sorry to everyone he’s loved before, sorry to this idiot kid who knew no better.

But he never has been good with it. “Got a flask?”

John laughs, startled into looking for one. He finds one in his bedside dresser, top drawer -- stashed away for the uglier, sleepless nights. Arthur knows the kind. Will probably know them closely in the days to come.

Passing the flask, John asks, maybe hurt: “ _That’s_ what you’re going with?”

Arthur drinks like a man parched in the badlands. Whiskey -- nothing rich or kind, but maybe it’ll make him forget this enough to get by. He shrugs through wiping his chin. He swears he can still taste himself on the roof of his mouth, can taste where John came over his hold. Drinks again, empties metal.

“Y’trying to forget this, then,” John adds, an idle disdain.

“I really should.” Arthur passes the flask back, resting his head in his hands. And because he’s always been an honest fool, he says, “Don’t think I could, though.”

John regards him again, newly. “Huh.”

Arthur considers confessing to someone once he gets back -- the crime of it all, the crime that he would commit again. Bad, beyond helping. He knows then that he owes John, and Dutch, and that kindly innkeeper an apology -- knows himself to be a bad man, always surrounded by bad men.

And he pretends not to hear those fond words: “Guess I was right.” John leans his back to the headboard, smiles small. “You really are a good man.”

Arthur would laugh at himself, but his voice is rawed. He makes an effort to direct their talking someplace else before John says anything more that will have him wanting to stay.

“I’m due back,” he says. Standing, stumbling in the pain of it, but he holds himself up by the windowsill.

He finds his clothes, finds his leather hat, finds his shirt bloody as he had left it and waiting over by that dresser at the side of the room. It’s put aside near a tumble of other laundry, like John might have planned to wash it in the river. Arthur puts it on, and puts the thought away where it won’t hurt. Cared for, God, what a thought.

John tugs his sleeve -- tugs on the heart there, too.

Arthur stares, heart burning.

He's hesitant to speak. “They’ll be waiting on me. I have to go.”

“Oh.” John looks hunched in on himself, hand withdrawing, hugging his legs before he dresses again. Maroon trousers, pale shirt, hides his skin with them. “Got a missus after all?”

Not surprised, maybe expecting it. It’s a wonder how he seems convinced Arthur would have to be wanted by someone.

“Been told I’m no good with commitment,” Arthur says, heavy. He might be watching John’s form too closely, toes the floorboards instead. Then, dry, “Not like you, apparently.”

But he wants to ask what makes the boy so sure he must be loved. There’s no ring, nothing to tell of his old love when she and Arthur had no money to offer each other anything, and no money to leave anything behind. That mourning may just never have left his eyes.

Oh, that poor mugger who had done them in. Blood on his hands and little to show for it, only the red mark of his crimes that sent Arthur to shooting open his heart. Blood, but not much else in it.

A woman who loved him like he could become a good man, and a boy who looked up to him like he always was one. Ten dollars, their lives were worth. The quartz they were buried in could sell for more.

With a hundred dollars tied to his life, John would be worth more dead, too.

John is watching like he knows he is watching a once-father. Knows what a father looks like, and not at all how to be one.

Looks small until he says, “So where you expected?”

“Nowhere good, I’d imagine,” Arthur drawls. He breathes through teeth, warring with his judgement. “Fallswood.”

Telling a bounty the home of a hunter. Mad, Dutch would call him mad and he’d nod along.

“Right, right.” John rises into a confidence, heading for the door. Treats it like long-known knowledge, as he begins clicking at chains. “Course, ‘cause you’re one of Dutch’s Boys.”

And then he’s the killer and crook Arthur forgot he was.

Arthur has to wonder just how much can be read on his face, has to wonder whether Dutch’s hold over him reached that far. “How’d you know that, again?”

John shrugs, looks on the cusp of laughing at himself -- at Fate’s grand sense of humour.

The same way he knows everything, then. Irrationally right.

“With that O’Driscoll feud, an’ people like _you._ ” He waves a hand, like that answers any at all of what that means. Something bad, Arthur knows, like he’s someone to keep far from the flock. “Ain’t many other hunter gangs t’go ‘round. Not to mention yours has a reputation o’ sorts.”

Arthur stares, hard-set. “A reputation?”

“Sure.” John picks at his hands, gone chalky. “There was a story ‘bout a deserter in that gang. Heard your man went and cut him up.”

“Not quite, but he had it coming.” Arthur is so swept along by the certainty in tone that he stumbles past the insinuation. “Hang on. My...?”

“Your van der Linde.” John says it like fact. He looks away, looks how Arthur felt seeing those photographs along the walls. “That’s who you’re gettin’ back to, right?”

It’s right, like everything he says and none of what he does, but there’s an undercurrent there that Arthur doesn’t what to say to.

He’s in a room with a taken man, a man who left a family behind. Arthur ought to be angry, and yet, he can’t find it in him -- it wouldn’t be fair to. John might be a freer man than he is.

No married man, but Dutch wore a ring for him -- something like a brass knuckle on obsidian. A ring for Hosea as well, an old lion-looking silver. Arthur wasn’t taught to ask questions, so he doesn’t know what they mean. Heard Hosea toast to it, though: ‘To the old guard, and to new beginnings.’

New, but he’s never asked what Dutch was like before they met that day. The man took him in without question -- bloody hands shaken, and a contract made.

It ran deeper than any gorge, any blood, any marriage. A man that wore two rings on his shooting hand -- theirs really is to be a lifelong engagement. Longer than life, even; like his red pendant -- something from his past that Arthur had never asked about -- that he still wears for Annabelle. He had a third ring, once, for Molly. Though he must have left it with her.

Arthur doesn’t answer to Dutch, here. Forgets who he should be answering.

No healthful labels would fit what he has with Dutch, so he doesn’t use them. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but with Dutch it ain’t-- it ain’t that, you know?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t know your _Dutch,_ ” John says derisively, and it might be the first time he doesn’t know something which Arthur holds dearly and dreadedly in his heart. “Come to think of it, I don’t... know much ‘bout you at all.”

It's cutting how true that is -- to think they had fallen so fast. As with anything John says, it’s honesty.

And Arthur has always been too honest himself, just as this boy knew when they met.

“Trust me,” he says. Hoping he can mimic how Dutch says it, sure as dawn even when he shouldn’t be. “There’ll be time for that.”

With how John’s eyes catch the light as he looks up and his skin glows like his hopeful smile and how Fate seems to pit them together -- Arthur even thinks it’ll be a promise kept.

“There better be,” John mumbles. All the bite is lost to how he says it through a smile, his hand trying to hide it like he could be shy. Shy, after all that they’ve done.

The sweet intimacy of it is too much. Arthur steps to leave.

“Here, let me--” John hurries, bounding to the door to pull at the chains again. His hands are shivering, from the cold or fear or passing excitement, and when the door opens he bows with some flourish like it took so much effort it was worth applause.

So youthful that Arthur humours him, claps, feels ever more the sinner.

Walks past it: a door of barred wood, chains, and a boxcar padlock picked straight from a train. Not the most welcoming. “You get many visitors, kid?”

John answers with cheek and no ill intent. Talking of lawmen or hunters when he says, “Not the good kind, if y’get me.”

But Arthur finds his own truth in that. Burdened by his shadow cast as the door pulls wide.

“Guess not.”

Out the door, the garden is the forest. White in the heavens, redwoods and the remnant rain, thickets and overgrowth. Mace’s Bend, clouded, wild, and with the dark sprawl of outlands that outcasts are drawn to. Home to a John Marston. Forest cabin with his face on the walls, his clothes in the drawers, his smell on the sheets.

The only place a man like him likely could find home. A fitting place, but there’s the evidence of his staying here.

Arthur turns to face him, brow raised. “Ain’t this a dangerous place for you t’be staying in? Thought you were on the run.”

“Sure. I’ll be tracked like elk if I stay much longer.” John leans against the doorway, on his side. He rolls his shoulder -- still wounded, under his shirt. “But it wouldn’t be good patchin’ you up in the rain now, would it? Needed shelter somewhere. Infection’s a bitch to handle, worse than you huntin’ folk.”

Arthur steadies his own wound. It’s heavier, now. “I think I weren’t worth that risk, Marston.”

John pouts, arms crossed. “I think you should get that death wish checked out.”

You’d think Arthur was the married man, getting scolded like that. Him. Married. It’s a foolish thought.

“Your mare’s by the silo there, by the way,” John tags on, pointing.

True to his word as he’s ever been, and Arthur sees her waiting by a valley clearing, farmhouse fences and the bowled iron of a silo. Sol is cleaned by the rain, glimmering with it like a far mirage. The never-changing certainty in all this. That’s his home, really. Wherever she will be, or wherever she will take him. Didn’t think John would honour that, but he’s a man who gifts kidnapped men and stolen goods -- a hopeless romantic, if hopelessly lawless.

Arthur finds it easier to say, now. What he couldn’t before, but maybe that’s the kind of honesty that comes from baring yourself to someone else.

“Thanks.”

John looks away, stammers, “I’m sure you’d do the same.”

Arthur won’t pretend he wouldn’t. The kid would probably be wise to it, call him out on it like Hosea. So he lets the truth lie.

It’s some distance down the hide of the hill where the farmground is. Arthur waits for himself to leave, but his legs keep him standing, thinking. An old-made instinct tells him that if he leaves John now, there will be nothing left if he comes back. He’s good at taking care of things -- he’s not good at taking care of people.

But he tries. “Don’t you go gettin’ shot now, y’hear?”

Turning back to the doorway, he sees John frown. “My shoulder’s fine, Morgan.”

Arthur huffs disbelief.

“And hey, who’re you to tell me that?” John pelts a rock, petulant. “You’re the one who nearly kicked the damn bucket. Y’better rest once you get back, or I’m killin’ that Dutch bastard.”

Arthur chuckles. Steps to leave, but it’s tough to walk with his wound, the first step always short of carrying him over. John stands about under the arch and offers him a hand, bothered by it when it’s refused.

Clicks his tongue. “Idiot. You’re still wounded.”

Arthur shrugs, hides his wincing. “But they don’t know that.”

“They-- they sent you there? To the slaughterhouse?”

“Boss himself.”

John talks timidly. “So he’ll think you’re... dead?”

This kid looks like he hasn’t grown yet into thinking about that. Maybe that’s how he can leave his family behind without a thought.

Arthur thinks about dying easily, resigned. Seen enough dead by now that he can picture his face on the corpses. “Probably,” he says. “Wasn’t far from it, was I?”

John shifts on his feet. Bitten lip, and he won’t meet Arthur’s eyes.

It really is like he’s gone and gotten married.

“Don’t you worry, kid.” Arthur isn’t used to comforting someone. “I won’t be dying anytime soon.”

Hasn’t felt a need to, for a time.

“Why’s that?”

Arthur flashes his teeth. “Hell don’t want me.”

John looks up, balks at him. “You are a sad, sad fool, Morgan.”

Unclear if John’s comforted, but at least he’s looking forward again. Looking at Arthur the whole time, now. Arthur can leave, he should leave, but he looks back over at where John is in the doorway. It’s stupid, really. Waiting there, watching, like he’s expecting something sweet, something like a farewell.

John is the one to speak, after a while.

“Y’know, Arthur.” He sounds kind, he sounds taken aback by what he’s about to say: “You make it real hard not to fall for you.”

Arthur prays that he can be dishonest.

“Yeah, well,” he says, stepping to leave. “You make it impossible.”

His prayers always did go unanswered.

He limps his way down the roll of the hill, and he doesn’t look back. Whether John was laughing at him, or smiling, or sad to see him go -- Arthur will never know.

But he knows he can’t tell a lie for the life of him -- Hosea would be mocking him for months. Everything Arthur’s ever given has been honesty. And yet, he hasn’t given John the plain truth. Poor kid believes he’s going back home to lick his wounds.

He isn’t, though. Fallswood will have to wait.

Because Dutch told him to take out the slaughterhouse. So when he staggers his way to Sol’s side and takes the reins, he sets out for the north. There’ll be young blood there, by now. The grunt gangsters sent there to put everything back together after the others were shot dead. Arthur knows because it’s his job, too -- mending things, once the worst blows over.

Arthur follows his orders, not his heart -- he rides out, and it wears down on him, his wound. Through twilight and the dark of the forest, he takes the path back through to where the greater dangers are. Sol doesn’t fight it. Arthur doesn’t know if he should fight it himself. He nurses this sweet, small thought that John would scold him, if he knew.

But Arthur goes back to the slaughter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Been worked like a dog, but I finally made this. Decided on a kind of masosub Arthur. I'm so darned sorry for the wait, these forty-something-degree days are not good on my conscience? My first bad porno -- so do tell me how terrible it was, or how terribly filthy? Thank you as per always, I truly love you all!


End file.
